A message from your leader, Phillip Washington:

Reading Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game as a teenager convinced me that science fiction is the most entertaining and thought provoking genre in literature. Fantasy, historical fiction, and political thrillers didn’t capture the sense of wonder available at the edge of the human imagination.

It is only in science fiction that we get what author Neal Stephenson describes as “idea porn”. It is in science fiction that the human imagination amalgamates all of human history, its past and its possible futures, its technologies and ideologies and wraps them all up into one glowing, futuristic theme park. It rolls you through a land of possibilities.

Neal Stephenson will be the first author that we celebrate in Offworld: The science fiction reading club sponsored by WordSpace. Stephenson is one of my favorite science fiction writers. He is the author of thirteen novels as well as collections of short fiction and essays. Each novel captures images from the cultural retina and displays his interpretation on the screen of the reader.(He does this in a funny, sometimes strange, yet always satisfying way. I have never read a Neal Stephenson book and not learned a wealth of information about the world around me, whether it was about the way things used to be, how things got to be the way they are now, or how things could possibly be in the future. And all of these things are wrapped in the implications of ideas and themes brought to us by technology, science, mathematics, the internet, and modern culture.

If you are already a Neal Stephenson fan or have never read one of his books, please join up. Members may choose which of Neal’s books they want to read. Our blog postings will direct members to online sources on Neal Stephenson. Our forums, hosted by the website Worlds Without End, will provide a place for ongoing discussions of individual books and general topics. Our meetings will include group discussion and guest speakers from the fields of science, philosophy, and literature.

To join up or ask questions email offworld@wordspace.us

Watch this blog for a guide to Neal Stephenson’s more popular novels as well as other info on Offworld.