NOTE:This post was written to introduce a new blog which has since been merged into this blog.

My intention with this blog is to demarcate, describe, and discuss an aesthetic that I’m interested in and a producer of: Folk Sci Fi

The impetus for this comes from two places:

My work as a part of the art collective/publishing company/noise band the Gold County Paper Mill, where the term “Folk Sci Fi” originates from, and a discussion that I had with my fellow blogger and good friend Ivan Lozano.

We were talking about whether or not science fiction is pop culture. I think that although pop culture has appropriated geek culture (and how and why that has happened is another blog entirely) to the point where the two are almost synonymous, geek culture is not everything that science fiction is.

Geek culture is Star Wars, its space opera, its fantasy and super heroes. There are themes in science fiction that go beyond these things and take the long view.

This sci fi is a vast inhuman consciousness floating in the emptiness between galaxies.

This sci fi is manufacturing visions of the wind-swept rocks of dead Mars, of the slow collapse of civilizations, of vast unknowable structures.

This sci fi is about sluggish transformations and the future of humanity.

It is trying to portray the inhuman.

Pop culture, by definition, cannot encompass these themes: it’s pop, it’s a bubble, it’s of the moment and totally humanistic.

What I’m trying to catalogue here, with this blog, is when pop culture, or folk, briefly touches these themes. That liminal zone is where folk sci fi dwells.

But this blog is an experiment, a public environment for me to explore my ideas. Feedback is encouraged. Welcome, let’s see how this goes! I’m planning on posting every Tuesday.