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FROM WEIRD TALES TO WIRED
Canon: A standard for evaluating, judging, testing,
or criticizing.
Loose Canon: Rants and polemical lit-crit sounding off in all directions.
Charles Platt grew up reading 1950s science fiction that promised immortality, superhuman intelligence, and vacations on Mars. He emigrated from Britain to New York City, became a science-fiction editor for Avon Books--and saw the techno-optimism of his childhood being eroded by ecofear and ennui, while formulaic fantasy novels stole market share from predictive science fiction.
Platt founded The Patchin Review, a little zine where well-known authors denounced the dumbing-down of science fiction. He became a prolific polemicist in journals such as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine, Science Fiction Eye, Interzone, Omni, Thrust, Heavy Metal, and The Washington Post. As John Clute remarked in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, "Science fiction is naggingly short of genuine iconoclasts: Charles Platt is therefore a necessary writer."
In 1993, after writing a dozen science fiction novels, Platt abandoned book publishing and switched to journalism. As a Senior Writer for Wired magazine he has investigated future science such as nanotechnology and human cloning, and finds that real-world lab work now promises the transcendant breakthroughs that used to be the stuff of science fiction.
Loose Canon collects Platt's most insightful writings, chronicling a journey from teenage optimism through angry cynicism to a new era of empowerment. Platt argues persuasively that hardcore prophets of the 1950s were right, doomsayers were wrong, and we really can transcend our fundamental human limitations--if we have the nerve to do so.