Sci Fi Geekery
Another blog post? So soon? Take the man’s temperature! (Yeah, they took my temperature yesterday, just so they can find out WTF is wrong with me – heart, lungs, temperature & blood pressure are all normal but the claret they took out of my arm now needs to be analysed…)
So, as I watch with interest my friend Nigel’s “progris riport” on Flowers for Algernon, I realise that the book he’s reading is some 40 years old and a previous Nebula Award winner, along with other prestigious titles like, er… Dune!
Oh dear! As much of a pseudo-geek as I can be it suddenly dawns on me that I am so utterly lacking on my sci-fi novel geekery. Granted, I know some of the titles in the Nebula Award winners’ list like Dune and Rendezvous with Rama and yes, a lot of author’s names I know so well, like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke (who died yesterday), even Le Guin, Silverberg, Niven and Pohl.
But have I read any of these prestigious titles, have I immersed myself in the words of these award-winning writers?
In a word… NO!
That’s so incredibly sad because as a child I was raised surrounded by these tomes. In the beige world of the 1970s the promise of the future was epitomised in the amazing allure of the Sinclair calculator, the digital watch, the ZX-81 and by the artwork on the covers of all the sci-fi novels…
And THAT is precisely my problem. As a small child I judged a book by its cover, I revelled in the joys of a Chris Foss spaceship on the front but I could not be bothered to trawl the big words of Asimov in order to see that vessel fight its way through the galaxy. That’s where George Lucas came to my rescue…
In the summer of ’77 I queued at the Odeon in Chelmsford to see Star Wars. The floodgates opened… In the town’s other theatre I saw Battle Beyond the Stars and The Black Hole, I braved the ridicule of my uncle to watch the Empire Strikes Back, had my dad take me to Return of the Jedi. At home the three TV channels would occasionally show Logan’s Run, Westworld or Silent Running…
OK, so maybe these aren’t sci-fi novel/novella classics of the Nebula Award winning ilk, but 2-hour shows were better for a kid’s attention span than a sprawling pseudo-intellectual paperback. But now that I realise I have missed out on such shining stars of the science fiction genre I feel that I need to renew my interest in sci-fi books, just as I’m recently rebuilding my E.E. Doc Smith collection…
But wait… I lie… I DID read *one* Nebula Award winner… I still have my copy of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (Ick… New Romancer… get that thought out of my head) I cannot remember much of it but it was good, it was fast, geeky, techno, YES! Is it anything like Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash that I just started reading? Mick Jones, guitarist of The Clash, wrote the song Buckethead about Snow Crash for his Carbon/Silicon project with Tony James and it’s my guitar hero that inspired me down the sci-fi reading route again…
Gah, I digress yet again… There’s no time to digress, I must finish Snow Crash before I launch into 40 years of missed geekery, and that’s not to mention all those Philip K Dick (he of Bladerunner et. al.) novels, I didn’t realise there were SO MANY!
Anyone else here dig sci-fi? Got any books to add to my list of 40?
Ha! It’s a funny thing isn’t it? I too came to sci fi late (we’re about the same age aren’t we L?) but my parents weren’t readers of the genre at all, so it wasn’t around. All my geeky friends did, however. I did get into the Dune series, but got bored after a while, and as a child I had a copy of the Earthsea trilogy by Ursula le Guin, but didn’t really enjoy it much. As an adult, someone recommended The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, and now le Guin is one of my fav authors!
I’ve recently started reading some of the Anne McCaffrey Dragon series, but they’re a bit pulpy I think.
That’s pretty much the extent of my involvement… Tho’ a TV ad just reminded me of ‘The Dark is Rising’ by Susan Cooper…
Mummy/Crit: You’re right on the money there, M/C
We’re close on the years I’m sure and my ‘rents never had much in the way of sci-fi, so it was the world at large that provided the teasing backdrop to my fantasy world…
But Le Guin was one of those authors whose name kept popping up in the Swords & Sorcery world so I’ll have to check her out…
Did you ever read Julian May’s Saga of the Exiles? That was a great set of four books and a nice bit of escapism…
I so identify with you but there are so many books to read that I end up reading 4-5 books at the same time. I think while in high school, I started reading scifi just to piss off my stepdad because I got tired of him telling me what to read. The Dune Chronicles I did not read until college but the vast scope and breadth of it just blew me away.
BTW, I just came across by accident a book called Glasshouse by Charles Stross. Have you heard of him? I’ve not read anything like this since William Gibson…
Narthex: Ouch, 4/5 at a time is a bit much
I’m struggling with Catch 22 which I started back in December and Snow Crash, let alone another 2/3 books on top of that LOL
I’ve seen the movie of Dune but I guess the book is the real deal. lemme buy a copy and read that next, after I find a copy with a decent cover.
And glasshouse looks good…
Oh, I’ve been reading like this for years. It’s the only way I can get through the harder books (like The History of the Chariot: from Ancient Egypt to Modern Day Abrams) and still get entertained by a novel I can read through in a day.
BTW, another classic. Short, conceptual, sweet and brilliant is Samuel Delany’s Nova.
Gotta put it on your list!
Narthex: History of the chariot, aye? Now that’s a curious sounding read…
OK, I got Nova on my list but that’s gonna be a toughie ‘cos that one’s outta print… but then that never stopped me getting my E E Doc Smith collection together
Well I read hundreds prhaps even thousands of scifi books over the years and to be honest, I can count on my fingers the good ones. Yep Dune is up there but can I recomend “The DNA cowboys Trilogy” written by “Mick Farren” in the seventies. Unbelievably acurate in its portrayals of consumerism, A.I. progress and human ego. At the same time its a physchodelic adventure story filled with fantastic and sometimes disturbing ideas.
It seems some of the best scifi came right out of ladbrooke grove in london in the sixties and seventies just like much of the music.
And I would also recomend “The dancers at the end of time” by Michael Moorcock. Funny and amazingly perceptive.
Re reading the entire Dune seris wont hurt either, Especially God Emporer. Its strange but it almost like Herbert predicted the latest rise of fanatical religion as a war tool. Or perhaps Osamah read Dune in his youth?
enjoy
Did I say re- reading Dune.. I ment actually reading it.
keith: You are so right about the Dune books. The most fascinating aspect of that series is how Herbert treats human social behavior and evolution as a system, almost an ecological system (not surprising because of his background). I don’t think that it was so much a prediction regarding fanatical religion as it was an identification of a pattern that has always happened throughout human history and will probably always be there in one way or another. In the next 50 years, we may be fighting wars through IP servers because it does more harm to have a weapon of mass identity theft than it is to bury an IED.
You are right about war through servers narthex, but I don’t think well be around in our current form for much longer anyway.
Check out the singularity theory on Google or wiki. We have the intelligent machine age sitting on our doordtep, just like Herbert predicted. Except I don’t think we will be able to stop it.
Sunday AM
Keithlightwaver: Mick Farren… Now we’re talking sci fi
Yeah, I read Texts of Festival, being a Hawkwind fan, and loved it. But The DNA Cowboys trilogy is something I need to bag… maybe I shoudl hit the car boot sale this morning?
Dancers at the End of Time… Yes, I’ve read that too many moons ago, also all the Elric novels and Corum too… Michael Moorcock has such an amazing imagination and doesn’t seem to have ever got the credit he deserves IMHO.
Right, let me see if there’s a copy of Dune at the car boot too…
Monday AM
The local car boot sale was dire yesterday, very little in the way of books unless you’re into Dan(ielle) Steele or Dan Brown *spontaneous awful pun alert* in fact it was really bad day for book hunting but I wasn’t going to let it get me Dan
Dune is sounding more and more impressive as you guys talk about it… maybe I should stop off at the charity shop(s on the way through to work this morning…
Narthex: You could be right about the ID theft idea blooming out of control, it’s turning into a bit of a beast as is the botnet issue.
Talking of predictions Snow Crash seems to have been right on the money with the 2nd Life idea… maybe that’s where they got it from… I must finish the amazing Catch 22 before getting back into Snow Crash… I’m no good at this multiple book handling
Thank you both for some stimulating discussion