h+ Magazine

DOCTOROW: Building a search engine that only contains the information that we’re mostly looking for is easy. But at that point, there’s no value. It’s pursuing the deviance, what Bruce Sterling called “Wooing the muse of the odd,” that actually creates a system that has a lot of perceived value. And that’s because we are all weird in some way.

This is the most corrosive thing that happens to people who self-identify as science fiction fans… the idea that everyone else is mundane in science fiction argot… you’re either a mutant or you’re a “norm,” right? But norms are every bit as weird as any of us. It’s a matter of presentation and identity. We are all of us every bit as weird as any one of us.