It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended

I sent the following by e-mail to derspatchel and he responded favorably, so I am transplanting it with minimal edits to the internet before I fall over and desperately try to sleep for a few hours. Not being able to breathe through my nose at all and my throat feeling swollen closed is a bad combination for my breathing comfort. (Yes, I saw a doctor. No, they didn't have anything helpful to say. I'm on antibiotics for the sinus infection, but they're not kicking in as rapidly as I would like.)

Background: Ian Sales does not like where science fiction is heading.

I started excerpting sentences to mock and critique and then I realized I was just copying every other paragraph. He longs for a kind of science fiction that (a) was never the only form of science fiction, witness all the horrible apocalyptic stories that clustered around the Great War and in some cases preceded it as people became afraid of the political and military developments that seemed inevitably on the horizon (b) excluded a great many people who lived then, live now, and are definitely going to be around in the future, failing to understand that the world wasn't simpler in the Golden Age of Science Fiction, it was just more narrowly sliced (c) was not invented by Hugo Gernsback; he coined the term that developed into the contemporary classification, but the first historically defined works of science fiction existed in the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century only accelerated the trend until the 1850's had to invent "scientific romance" to describe all the speculative novels springing up like weeds. Edgar Rice Burroughs publishes his first Barsoom novel in the 1910's. Gernsback doesn't get Amazing Stories off the ground until '26. He's also talking strictly (puzzlingly) about American sci-fi; the British tradition is and always has been either more pessimistic or more realistic, depending on whether you like that sort of thing or not. Richard Jeffries' After London was detailing the post-apocalyptic deterioration of society in 1885. There is no Great Man in The War of the Worlds (1897) unless you really feel warmly toward the common cold.