I've got a long guest post up at John Scalzi's 'blog Whatever, part of his ongoing "Big Idea" series for writers to talk about their work. For this post I waded deep into the history of how I came up with the Billion Worlds setting and my future plans for more stories in that future.
It did make me wonder something: various libraries around the country have collections of "papers" from various authors. H.P. Lovecraft's letters and unpublished drafts are at the John Hay Library at Brown University, for example.
But I have no "papers," at least not as such. I have a hard drive stuffed with material — but memory storage decays, formats and hardware become obsolete. Will there be any "papers" of 21st-century writers for libraries to keep? And if libraries do maintain electronic archives of unpublished material by authors, how secure will they be? What's to prevent some busybody from going into the John Scalzi Collection at the University of Chicago Library in 2121, in order to remove (or insert) passages offensive to that era's sensibilities? With a box full of crumbling old typescripts one can at least authenticate the age of a document, and whether it was made on the right typewriter with the right kind of ink. But electronic documents have no such protection. Metadata can be tinkered with.
It will be ironic if future centuries have more concrete information about pre-2000 authors than they do about their nearer contemporaries.
Comments