Re: American Politics: Discuss and Debate
EarthPrime.com is going to be taking SLIDERS REBORN down. They are going to be refocusing their site on their current team. I appreciate their gracious message letting me know, and I am grateful for how they gave my fan fiction series finale a home for 10 years. Strangely, my primary response is... political.
I have been slowly converting SLIDERS REBORN to an ePub friendly format for Archive of Our Own. At times, I've stepped back from the task. I've been focusing on my communications work, volunteering for an autism support organization, and honestly, my main priority these days is making my employers, sisters, mother and now my girlfriend happy. I love SLIDERS, but I haven't had as much time to put into it as life has demanded more from me.
It is interesting to look at my writing from 10 years ago and see that SLIDERS REBORN is an artifact of a very specific era of tentative optimism that neoliberalism was a negotiable evil and that racism, homophobia, fascism, jingoism, scientific misinformation and economic inequality were fighting a losing battle against a new generation of thinkers, builders, workers, advocates and activists. SLIDERS REBORN believes that a golden age could be ahead of us and leaves the sliders at the edge of hope. It was a story for the time.
That time isn't today. Racism and fascism have come back strong. Scientific illiteracy is forming public health policy and dominates government to the point where vaccination and masks have become political issues instead of factual matters of epidemiology and particle physics. The working class of America has, by popular vote, decided to support and celebrate and declare their loyalty to the billionaires who pillage and rob and hoard more wealth than they could ever spend and leave workers in poverty. Transphobia and bigotry have become standard operating procedure for government.
EarthPrime.com deciding to take down SLIDERS REBORN reflects how SLIDERS REBORN was a story for a time that has passed in a place we aren't in. For the time being, it's on Google Docs, people will be able to find it via TV Tropes and a link on Archive of Our Own. It's all here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/19GS … it?tab=t.0
But ultimately, all of it is archival material and it should go to Archive of Our Own.
I think a SLIDERS today should always be an inverted mirror of today, and today is a different world, and that inversion is more like this:
https://sliders.tv/bboard/viewtopic.php?id=490