From Prof Michael Saler, History Department, University of California, Davis.
A friend sent me Mr. Ebert’s column, published awhile ago in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, in which he suggested SF fandom was a virtual world that anticipated the world wide web, and that “Someday an academic will write a study proving that the style, tone, and much of the language of the online world developed in a direct linear fashion from science fiction fandom”.
I wish I had read that column sooner, as I did write such a book, which has just been published by Oxford University Press: As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality.
Ebert: When I first logged online, I had an eerie feeling I’d been here before.
