Wednesday, September 8, 2010

io9's Helpful Scifi Series

P is for Pyew! Pyew! by flickr user Don Solo

I think I may have mentioned the A/V Club's enjoyable Gateways to Geekery series that has featured informational articles on a variety of niche interests people really geek out on, like Lovecraft or the Marx Brothers, as well as helpful suggestions to get newcomers hooked.  They suggest particular gateway titles for beginners, other titles to grab later in one's geeky journey, and frequently a few titles best left to the most entrenched aficionados.

The blog io9 has a similar series of posts tagged scifi101 that are less varied than the Gateways as they all focus on science fiction.  Scifi 101 includes posts with titles like "How to get into 20 classic science fiction shows," which lists suggestions on where to start watching TV series to best get hooked, and "Fictional Science 101: Important scientific ideas that inform science fiction," which lists summaries of some important ideas as well as references to nonfiction works for more information.

Lessons I've learned include that when I finally break down and check out Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I should start with season 2, and that the singularity is...hard to sum up at this point in my sentence given both it's complexity and my choice of sentence structure. 

If you happen to be aware of other sorts of blogs that attempt to attract newcomers to genres, authors, performers, etc., feel free to post a link in the comments.

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