Thinking About: Reading Science-Fiction

I’ve been reading SF now for about 35 years. I was introduced to it by a friend of my brother who leant me a few battered copies of E E ‘Doc’ Smiths space opera series. I still remember the rush of reading 40’s pulp SF. It was and remains to this day my mind expanding drug of choice.

I definitely had a good start and a better grounding reading classics such as 1984, Dune, I, Robot, A Fall of Moondust, Rendezvous with Rama, The Deathworld Trilogy, Slan, Foundation and much else besides throughout my teenage years. I read voraciously anything by Clarke, Asimov, Herbert, Simak, Heinlein, Harrison, Moorcock, Pohl, Shaw, Farmer, Vogt, Blish, Cooper, Wyndham, Anderson, Burroughs, Dick and on and on. Part of this was fed, guided and encouraged by one of my Maths teachers who recognised in me a huge fan of the genre. We made a pact. He would lend me a book if I leant him one. Of course it was a ruse – to get me buying SF for myself. I seriously doubt looking back if I’d lent him a single book he hadn’t already read or had no intention of reading. But it certainly worked. I started my obsession with all things Scinence-Fiction. 35 years later I have no idea how much SF I have held in my hands and passed through my brain. Lots – I know that much. I have at least 6 floor to ceiling bookshelves jam-packed with SF/Fantasy books and many more scattered around the house waiting to be read. I estimate that I must have read something approaching two thousand SF novels and I still have most of them providing expensive insulation in my library like home.

But how, you might be asking yourselves, can anyone read so much from such a narrow genre. Firstly – as you will have seen here – I no longer read SF exclusively of anything else (indeed I’ve always read other things) and find that I also enjoy Thrillers, Spy novels, Historical novels, War novels and even occasionally main-stream books too. But I always return to SF for the simple reason that it is anything but a narrow genre. SF has the whole Universe to work in and the whole of time to base its plots. The scale of the tale can also vary enormously from a single room, to a generation ship making its way between the stars to a galaxy spanning history of civilisation itself. It can be technical enough to warm the heart of any kind of Geek or can explore societies in alien environments or alien civilisations themselves. Such tales have always fascinated me and I always relish losing myself in an alien city full of exotic sights and sounds. SF can be full of robots, monsters, star-ships and the fizz of ray-gun fire but it is often far more sophisticated than TV or Movie SF would suggest. It can chill the heart or quicken the blood and the best of it can thrill like nothing else I have experienced. It is the ever present thrill of the yet to be discovered, the thrill of the possible and the thrill of what might be just around the corner. Quite simply I love SF above all else and if I live that long will probably be reading it in another 35 years – though by then this increasingly SF-like world might make it like watching the nightly news, though hopefully a little less dramatic at times!