Every year, the World Science Fiction Society presents the Hugo Awards to honor the best science fiction and fantasy works of the year. This is the highest honor in the genre.
The award is named after Hugo Gernsback, the founder of Amazing Stories magazine. He is known as one of the "fathers of science fiction" for his promotion of the genre. However, Gernsback's interests extended beyond just science fiction novels; he was also a passionate experimenter and inventor. Before publishing Amazing Stories, he documented the rise and evolution of amateur radio technology and actively participated in it.
Although he is remembered for his role in science fiction history, Gernsback also pioneered an independent and important writing style that is lesser known. He was a typical cataloger - a recorder, supplier, and supporter of emerging amateur technology scenes.
Cataloging is a specific type of writing that developed in conjunction with the technical community and played an active role in shaping the fate of a given technology or toolset. Catalogs themselves are transient and cyclical, rising and falling with the scenes they cover. But the skills and importance of cataloging are eternal. Gernsback pointed the way.
From his report card, it can be seen that Gernsback was an average student in subjects other than physics. He had a love for reading in his childhood, with H.G. Wells and Jules Verne being his favorite authors, and he dreamed of electrical projects. In 1904, at the age of 19, he immigrated to New York City and immediately began working, fueling his passion and expressing his design ideas, first in Scientific American magazine. In addition, he opened his own store in the Lower East Side - the Electro Importing Company, which imported and sold electrical equipment from Europe. This business created one of the earliest mail-order catalogs for radio technology nationwide. Most of the customers were fellow enthusiasts.
Catalogers are prototypes. They are essentially writers, often without formal training - a role similar to that of a freelance journalist. They often run small businesses, selling toolkits and equipment on-site, hence adopting the catalog format, but these enterprises rarely have good financial results. In addition to Gernsback, other notable examples include Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, Tim O'Reilly's O'Reilly Media technical books, and Dale Dougherty's Make: Magazine.
There are significant similarities among these examples. The content provided by catalogers is different from traditional news reporting or financial investment; they are agents. Through the combination of tools, information, and imagination, they help draw a map around new communities.
If you ask them to describe their work, you will get a vague answer. As Stewart Brand said, "I find things and found things."
If you ask them how they do it, you will get even more different answers. I asked this question directly in interviews with Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly. O'Reilly said he keeps a mental map of what technologies should exist - a skill of "knowing it when you see it." Dougherty said he follows his passion. He told a story of meeting Tim Berners-Lee at the 1991 Hypertext Conference. Berners-Lee was downgraded to a poster session instead of a main event because the organizers didn't find the web interesting enough. But Dougherty was intrigued by the project. Everything else at the conference was slow and felt boring, but Berners-Lee offered something he could do himself - build a webpage. Dougherty became an advocate for the nascent web.
Whatever the skill, it seems to be widely transferable. Catalogers often play this role in multiple scenes throughout their careers. Brand is known for entering several fields based on his interests: the counterculture movement of the 1960s, the environmental movement, and the personal computer industry, among others. O'Reilly and Dougherty play significant roles in areas such as the internet, open-source software, and the maker movement. From a cataloging perspective, this diverse career path makes perfect sense. Their precise timing - appearing at critical moments in technological history - is self-reinforcing. They get involved when things get interesting, and things get more interesting when they get involved.
There is also a notable chain of influence. When we started OpenROV (our own attempt to launch an amateur marine technology scene), we emulated Chris Anderson, who documented the amateur drone scene through his website DIYDrones.com while serving as the editor of Wired magazine. Dougherty spent most of his career at O'Reilly Media. A young Tim O'Reilly initially aimed to publish articles in Brand's CoEvolution Quarterly. Even though they can't define it, catalogers seem drawn to this work and most can place themselves in some informal lineage.
Apart from their association with Gernsback, catalogers have a long history with science fiction. The first issue of Whole Earth Catalog recommended Dune, and Tim O'Reilly wrote a biography of Dune author Frank Herbert. The first issue of Byte magazine quoted Robert Heinlein, documenting the early development of the personal computer industry. The first issue of Make: Magazine featured articles by science fiction writers Bruce Sterling and Cory Doctorow. As Annalee Newitz put it, catalogers bridge the gap between the genre and the broader "science project," adding a romantic element that turns a quiet, technical hobby into an exploration of shaping the future.
Searching for and explaining new ideas.
In Kurt Vonnegut's novel Bluebeard, there is a passage where the protagonist, a painter named Rabo Karabekian, recalls valuable lessons he learned from World War II veteran Paul Slazinger:
Slazinger claimed that he had learned from history that most people couldn't open their minds to new ideas unless they were in a group of people who also had new ideas. Otherwise, life would go on for them just as before, regardless of how painful, unrealistic, unfair, ludicrous, or downright idiotic that life might be.
He said that this group had to consist of three kinds of specialists. Otherwise, the revolutions that were attempted in politics, art, science, or whatever, were doomed to failure.
The rarest of these specialists, he said, was a true genius - a person capable of having seemingly good ideas not generally circulated. "A lonely genius," he said, "is a crackpot until his ideas are generally accepted."