The Era of Talkback

In his poem “Fragments” in this issue, WC Roberts asks an important question.

Where am I amongst the boxes
afloat aimlessly in an endless gray
expanse?

The answer is, you’re on WordPress! Yes, I’ve finally given up the Geocities-circa-1997 amateur hand-coded HTML style so popular among genre fiction sites, and switched to an automatic blog machine. Though hesitant at first, I was happy to find that WordPress allows me to write “excerpts” that have nothing to do with the actual text of the posts, so I’ll still be able to disingenuously mischaracterize the contents of the stories that I post to the front page. More importantly, the site now has a talkback feature. Ever since I put out the first call for submissions almost two years ago, there’s been fancy talk on the submissions page about how this website would allow authors to “create a dialogue through their stories about humanity’s relationship with our increasingly artificial world,” but there’s never been any real “dialogue” on Labyrinth Inhabitant, because the site’s primitive design barred anybody but me from using it as a communication medium.

To be honest, I’ve been hesitant to perform the talkback upgrade, since it might be tough to concentrate on the stories when one’s thoughts are being drowned out by the howling, roaring vacuity of “Zero Comments” on the bottom of each post. I can’t guarantee there’ll be any discussion, and if there’s not, visiting the site may seem like a bit of a lonely experience. But the time has come for Labyrinth Inhabitant to grow up a little bit and either find an audience or not.

And that means I get to lighten up a little in my iron-fisted reign of editorial control. So I certainly don’t expect the talkback posts to be treatises about Humanity’s Relationship With Our increasingly Artificial World. Talkbacks are for criticism, sarcasm, self-aggrandizement, semiliterate political rants, self-promotion, socializing, shameless toadying by the authors’ friends, shameless astroturfing by the authors pretending to be the authors’ friends, incomprehensible trackback notifications, creepy automated messages that don’t even seem to be selling anything from spambots signaling each other like tree frogs on a summer night…well, depending on how it goes, I may draw the line at that last one.

Also, there’s the possibility, however small, that I’ve introduced some bugs during the site transition. If anything goes wrong, please let me know at labyrinthinhabitant@gmail.com.

Thanks to this issue’s authors: Patricia Russo, Robert E. Keller (again!), Gareth D Jones and WC Roberts.