Trying To Write Sci-Fi: Unsuccessful So Far

[RonPrice]

After years of trying to find the language to write and talk about the serious, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, the ability came with increasing degrees of effectiveness and with more and more pleasure. Some seem to have this ability virtually at birth; with me it was a slowly acquired art and, partly for that reason, a much appreciated one. There were times when I felt this ability dried up and deserted me. This was especially the case in the nearly twenty years when this autobiography was in its first edition(1984-2003); in some of the courses I took by external studies my capacity to write what a supervisor wanted simply seemed beyond my ability(1978 to 1988); when yet another magazine declined to accept a poem or an article I had spent what seemed a lifetime composing(1979 to 1999); when I tried to write a novel, a sci-fi fantasy or a long quasi-historical-philosophical piece(1983-2005). But by the time I had completely left the world of full-time, part-time and volunteer/casual work—by degrees in the years 1999 to 2005—I knew where my abilities could be found and tapped and there I would stay, as far as the eye could see. At the age of sixty, in the earliest year of my late adulthood(60-61), I had finally found and was able to distinguish between the places of literary fertility and the places where only dry dog-biscuits existed.

For many years when I was a teacher I compiled reading material for my students around an eclectic mix of book chapters, journal articles, historical documents, extracts from literary texts, journalism, inter alia. Now, in my autobiographical work, I have followed a similar pattern but put a pot pourri of material into one work. I give to readers a single-authored, multidisciplinary sourcebook in the field of autobiography, an autobiography with several formal principles underpinning it, one principle of which is the necessity for digressions, parentheses, with wanderings from the point. To this multidisciplinary work I have added a medley of variegated products from a poetic inclination, an inclination that has led to a certain prolixity. Some may see this work as just another word for creative disorder. Time will tell whether it leads to produc t sci-fi writing.