I love science fiction. There is just something about the idea of other places, other beings, other IDEAS, that fascinate me. So often I wish I could be on some space craft out there exploring that the yearning becomes almost painful. It’s an idealized culture, scifi. Ethics are better, technology is awesome, mundane problems are already solved and people live better.
I like that.
Oh I know, some scifi stories deal with the darker side of life. There are always scifi books that deal with corruption, tyranny and power hungry people who just like to make others suffer. Those can be good reads too, just to see how the author imagines those horrors and how to deal with them. But my idea of a good read is the idealized world that has banished hunger, eliminated current illnesses and produce highly educated people who are doing what they want in life.
Because once those problems are dealt with, the author(s) can start imagining what people would be like without the pressures of day to day concerns.
And that’s what I like. The exploration of what we could become.
And since we’ll never really know for sure what we will become until we get there, one idea is as good as another. Why not explore options?
Scifi became an obsession for me back when I was in college the first time around. I liked it before, but something else was triggered back then. I blame it on a humanities instructor I had. He was small and stout, and had that look about him that said reading and writing were his idea of heaven.
You know, a nerd.
During one of his classes, we had been assigned a particular boring book to read. So dull, that most of us in the class couldn’t even get past the first chapter. I can’t even remember the name of the book, that’s how bad it was. Disturbing because what if I run into it again and waste my time reading it?
Our instructor gave us a stern talking to about how reading isn’t just for pleasure. Reading is for enriching the mind. We should be grabbing onto books as if they were a lifeline, not just because we like to read, but because we want to learn about how other people think, and be exposed to other ideas that we may or may not agree with.
Reading is an active experience, and we should be trying with all our force to break out of the bars of our mental prison and get out of ourselves.
That was his point.
Others in the class may have taken that to mean you have to immerse yourself in the classics, or even find authors you wouldn’t normally read. But for me, it made me look at scifi in a different light.
What about living longer than the 80 to 100 years we have now?
What about a culture where machines rule the world and humans are mere servants to those machines?
What about a human society so far in the future that the planet Earth is just a myth lost in the antiquity of time?
How would we deal with creatures that are so alien that being in the same room as they would cause a human to die, either painfully slow or instantly?
How do we deal with these things?
They’re all conceivable. Aren’t they?
We’re on the verge of exploring our galaxy now. Why shouldn’t we consider these factors and find options on how to deal with it?
So I read Heinlein and Herbert and Robinson with a thirst and hope that one day …
One day …
Maybe.
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Monday, August 02, 2010
Books
Books are dangerous things.
My father taught me the value of reading very early on. He had to. I was raised in a school system that insisted children with any kind of learning disability were synonymous with idiocy. If he had taken the word of the school counselors and psychologists, I never would have learned to read and probably would be treated as a substandard individual even now. Fortunately, my father had different ideas.
He was convinced that if he could get me deep enough into a story, I would continue reading it on my own.
He was right.
I no longer remember what he started me on in those early days, but I do remember the Trixie Belden phase. They were the sub-standard versions of the Nancy Drew books. A rather fantastic (and not necessarily in a good way) series, of mysteries that a group of teenagers managed to run into and solve for the benefit of friends, family, community and probably the world. I remember reading those for hours on end while lounging on the big armchair in the living room.
It was while reading those books that I experienced, for the first time, the sensation of being so wrapped up in the story, that it takes a split second (that can seem like entire minutes) to figure out what the outside world was about. I think this is why I remember those books so completely.
From there I got into better things. In high school, where I would be so bored I’d beg to be allowed to stay home and left to my own devices for a few precious hours of the day, my father would hand me books that I could hide behind my textbooks and read while the teacher would lecture about whatever mundane topics he was covering. The one that springs to mind right now is A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift.
It’s a story about population control through cannibalism. Perhaps not the best thing to give a young teenager to read while going to school, but it happened to be in the car at the moment (don’t ask me why). The one teacher I did show it to had no idea who Jonathan Swift was, let alone what The Modest Proposal was about. Something that bothered my father, a college professor, more than surprised me. To me, all teachers were stupid. Even my father.
I was 15 going on 16; give me a break.
The next year I dropped out of school and went straight into college, but that’s a story for another time.
I have since discovered other reading gems that I have treasured and enjoyed, but now to the meat of this essay.
One book leads to another, which leads to another, and the next thing you know, you have a whole list of books that you probably will never have time to read, let alone enjoy and reread.
I have a working list of titles that I’ve been collecting off and on since high school. It runs, at the moment, to about 4500 titles. It includes everything from children's books to great classics to those titles that might be considered “alternative,” although how a book can be “alternative” I’m not really sure.
Reading is my obsession. If I don’t have anything to read, I go into a panic. At the moment, it’s not a problem though.
I just added Anais Nin to the list. The problem is, I want to read her NOW rather than after I’ve read the 4500 on the list.
And no, there’s nothing anywhere that says I have to read the list in order, but I do have a desire to read other titles at the same time. Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller and Gore Vidal are on the list, too. Not to mention Robert Heinlein, Joyce, and Nietzche.
So why am I now reading Laurell K. Hamilton’s faerie series? Which is nothing more than fluff that’s not even made from natural materials?
Because books are dangerous!!!!
While they can help wile away the time, or even give you some kind of knowledge on subjects you never heard of before, they can also lead you astray from topics that can enrich your mind.
In other words, some books are good, some are bad, and how you define those parameters is entirely up to you. For me, Henry Miller would be a better book to read, but right now, faeries are the subjects that lead me astray.
And badly written stories about faeries too.
But the erotic scenes are good.
Which is another reason Anais Nin made it to the list.
Those who have read both, will understand.
My father taught me the value of reading very early on. He had to. I was raised in a school system that insisted children with any kind of learning disability were synonymous with idiocy. If he had taken the word of the school counselors and psychologists, I never would have learned to read and probably would be treated as a substandard individual even now. Fortunately, my father had different ideas.
He was convinced that if he could get me deep enough into a story, I would continue reading it on my own.
He was right.
I no longer remember what he started me on in those early days, but I do remember the Trixie Belden phase. They were the sub-standard versions of the Nancy Drew books. A rather fantastic (and not necessarily in a good way) series, of mysteries that a group of teenagers managed to run into and solve for the benefit of friends, family, community and probably the world. I remember reading those for hours on end while lounging on the big armchair in the living room.
It was while reading those books that I experienced, for the first time, the sensation of being so wrapped up in the story, that it takes a split second (that can seem like entire minutes) to figure out what the outside world was about. I think this is why I remember those books so completely.
From there I got into better things. In high school, where I would be so bored I’d beg to be allowed to stay home and left to my own devices for a few precious hours of the day, my father would hand me books that I could hide behind my textbooks and read while the teacher would lecture about whatever mundane topics he was covering. The one that springs to mind right now is A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift.
It’s a story about population control through cannibalism. Perhaps not the best thing to give a young teenager to read while going to school, but it happened to be in the car at the moment (don’t ask me why). The one teacher I did show it to had no idea who Jonathan Swift was, let alone what The Modest Proposal was about. Something that bothered my father, a college professor, more than surprised me. To me, all teachers were stupid. Even my father.
I was 15 going on 16; give me a break.
The next year I dropped out of school and went straight into college, but that’s a story for another time.
I have since discovered other reading gems that I have treasured and enjoyed, but now to the meat of this essay.
One book leads to another, which leads to another, and the next thing you know, you have a whole list of books that you probably will never have time to read, let alone enjoy and reread.
I have a working list of titles that I’ve been collecting off and on since high school. It runs, at the moment, to about 4500 titles. It includes everything from children's books to great classics to those titles that might be considered “alternative,” although how a book can be “alternative” I’m not really sure.
Reading is my obsession. If I don’t have anything to read, I go into a panic. At the moment, it’s not a problem though.
I just added Anais Nin to the list. The problem is, I want to read her NOW rather than after I’ve read the 4500 on the list.
And no, there’s nothing anywhere that says I have to read the list in order, but I do have a desire to read other titles at the same time. Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller and Gore Vidal are on the list, too. Not to mention Robert Heinlein, Joyce, and Nietzche.
So why am I now reading Laurell K. Hamilton’s faerie series? Which is nothing more than fluff that’s not even made from natural materials?
Because books are dangerous!!!!
While they can help wile away the time, or even give you some kind of knowledge on subjects you never heard of before, they can also lead you astray from topics that can enrich your mind.
In other words, some books are good, some are bad, and how you define those parameters is entirely up to you. For me, Henry Miller would be a better book to read, but right now, faeries are the subjects that lead me astray.
And badly written stories about faeries too.
But the erotic scenes are good.
Which is another reason Anais Nin made it to the list.
Those who have read both, will understand.
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