emersonfortheday.com - web imitating art

In Kim Stanley Robinson's Science in the Capital series of novels (Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005), and Sixty Days and Counting (2007)), the website emersonfortheday.com has has a central place in setting the tone of the novel and providing important context for shaping the thoughts and actions of one of the protagonists.

After reading the third book in the series, I finally decided to visit the site to see if it existed, thinking that I, too, could benefit from a daily reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I was pleased to discover that there really was an emersonfortheday.com -- it had been created by one of the series' readers as a tribute to Robinson's work and his message. As the site's creator notes in the site's "about" page: "I decided to make web imitate art."

In a case of the web imitating the web imitating art, there is now also an epictetusfortheday.com site. Since Kim Stanley Robinson's books inspired a real incarnation of the Emerson for the Day site, I imagine that Tom Wolfe's protagonists in A Man in Full could have found an Epictetus for the Day site just as useful in their novel's setting.