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What was your research process like?
Ward Shelley :First, there are Web sites made by fans that provide incredible amounts of information. I didn't come up with any new, original research: These guys did. What I do is I digest it, I edit it, I put in a form you can see all at once. That's what my charts do: They put things in relation to one another, so you can get a kind of topology of time. That's the only contribution I'm making. And I'm throwing away information to keep things simple enough. I do some kind of quantification and I rely a little bit on my subjectivity, how I feel about things. I tend to privilege the things I care about.

It would be easier to do this on a computer than by hand. But the reason I do it by hand is that one of the important ethical points to make here is that, in the end, this is one person's point of view. It has no real authority. So I wanted to make it look like it was just one guy scribbling on paper, and then painting it. I think that books have a kind of authority given to them just because of their machine-made quality. It's like it's coming from something larger than one person. But ultimately you always have to interject the subject, so I always want to keep it so that point is clear to me.

There was a book or two I relied on. Brian Aldiss wrote a book called Billion Year Spree. Every science fiction reader will know him. And also a guy called Barry Malzberg. He's very passionate. He's kind of disappointed in the science fiction genre; he feels like it's decayed, so he has a really strong point of view. And then there's Asimov. He wrote a lot about dividing the genre up in a cladistic way. A cladogram is a kind of genealogical chart, most often of species. It tends to branch things out into discrete categories. Asimov did this not so much by genre but by period. He's the guy who ID's that this is the period of social and psychological interest, this is the period of interest in form, this is the period of interest in action. And other people come up with the genre: This is the action-adventure part, this is the space opera.