John imperio on Anti-Matter

Norman I have to apologize for having the need to comment on everything you write about in anti- matter. But I respect your writing and think that it is great that fans can comment on interesting stories you write. After reading this interview it reminded me of something I read recently about a man writing a fiction book on phenomena that is real: phantom islands: “ A phantom island is a cool name for a type of cartography error that crops up several times in the history of mapmaking: believing that an island exists where none does.” ( I think it is interesting approach that someone wrote a fiction book about something that is real. Drug addiction ) And this man writing this book about phantom islands found out that someone beat him to it. But this other author wrote a nonfiction book about phantom islands. And this author writing a fiction book about phantom islands believes that his yet to be published book will be more interesting then the nonfiction book about phantom islands : (I apologize it is quite a lengthy quote) “ The other, more intriguing possibility is that this book shows the limits of nonfiction. I’ve always had more trouble reading nonfiction books compared to fiction. I find that peculiar, in a way — I value knowledge of the real world quite a lot, while I don’t care about fictional universes at all. I suppose that fiction, freed from the constraints of truth-telling, is just more optimized to be interesting. But also, learning about the world can be done in a variety of ways, and storytelling is seldom the most efficient or pleasurable one, probably because real stories are always imperfect. I like reading an info-dump like Wikipedia more than I like reading (most) nonfiction books. The Phantom Atlas tries to tell nonfictional stories. In theory this should be easy: the stories around phantom islands are fun and interesting by default. But in practice it doesn’t work that well, and I think it’s because phantom islands are already fictional. The point of reading about them is to be amazed and inspired, which is, of course, the point of fiction in general. Treating them as an encyclopedic subject is sort of pointless (unless you’re writing in a literal encyclopedia).”