It's in the blood. Long a resident of California, I find that I can now only dimly fathom the intricacies of Southern manners and indirection. But I remain a Southerner. How odd, then, that I became a part-time writer of science fiction, a genre devoted to technology and tomorrow. The Southerner's identity rests firmly on events now shrouded by more than a century of misty recollection and outright fabrication.
Science fiction is about the future, mostly.
Frequently it has been molded by a Heinleinian fascination with the winners, the doers. The frontier looms large in science fiction as a place to be confronted, pushed against, defeated, expanded. The South was definitely not a frontier. Instead, from early on it was wilderness already enclosed by the still-expanding nation. As a boy growing up in rural southern Alabama, the South was a great piney reserve holding unfathomed mysteries and a sense of a stretching past.