What's Out There?

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.