Sci-Fi Books that Shaped Me 

This is kind of stolen (with modifications) from Stephen over @ Reading Freely. 

For the greater part of my reading life (over 50 years now) my ‘go to’ books have been Science Fiction. Indeed, when I started out (VERY late in my early teens) I read SF almost exclusively. Needless to say, the genre has had a significant impact on making me who I am today. 

As I’ve mentioned several times the spark that ignited my lifelong passion for books was Triplanetary by E E ‘Doc’ Smith (which I must re-read at some point). This was a classic tale of Space Opera published in 1934 and was full of alien races, exploding stars and huge space battles. It was exactly what a young teen needed to literally blow their imagination. The other (very) early influence, just prior to this, was 1984 by George Orwell leant to me by a sympathetic English teacher at school. This slice of classic dystopian fiction was a foundation to my distrust of the authoritarian impulse and a major building block of my political belief system. My subsequent reading of The Dispossessed by Ursula K LeGuin kicked off my longtime interest in Anarchism and all things politically on the Left. 

In a much more general sense Science Fiction significantly shaped the way I thought and, no doubt, still think about the world. One of the ways it did that was to make me wonder about the real science behind the science fiction. Reading about aliens, spaceships, time machines and robots (amongst MANY other things) got me wondering about how these things actually worked. How do you actually navigate in space? Is there (or was there) life on Mars? How do lasers work? What happens when a craft approaches the Speed of Light? Can you go faster? The only way to even begin to answer those questions was to hunt out books in my local library and read up on them. 

Along with (later) reading History, the different societies portrayed in SF (both human and alien, alternate and future) showed me that things could or can be different than they are now. They taught me that this wasn’t IT. That things could change for the better, that life as we lived it wasn’t inevitable – nothing like it. There was an alternative, indeed MANY alternatives. Speaking of which... reading Alternative History (one of my favourite sub-genres) taught me just how contingent things are. That even small changes, from a humble individual could at the right time and in the right place change history profoundly. Yet again it taught me that there was no such thing as Fate, no Destiny, no Plan. That things could have been very different from what we often accept as inevitable. 

Although reading Science-Fiction didn’t make me an Atheist I can see how it helped to reinforce that idea. Quite a lot of SF resolves around puzzles to be solved. Sometimes they’re as mundane as ‘How do we get from A to B without dying?’ Other times its ‘What are the aliens going to do next or How can we understand what they’re trying to say to us?’ The story then revolves around gathering evidence, putting together theories and testing them until you come up with a working solution. This reinforced the idea in my youthful growing brain that all problems had potential solutions and that what I needed to do was to analyse the issue (ANY issue), do my research and come up with a working hypothesis that I could test against reality. I then applied this idea to EVERYTHING I came across. Over time I became curious about everything (my ‘butterfly mind’) as well as sceptical about everything too. Whenever I can across an assertion my immediate response was “Prove it.” 

Needless to say, with my growing brain marinating in a regular infusion of SF in all its variety, my reading influenced (or some would no doubt say warped) my view of myself and the world. I got used to people looking at me strangely for the questions I asked, the fact that I asked questions at all, the depth of my scepticism (I even impressed my Masters tutors on that point), the solutions I offered (more often rejected as unworkable or too expensive – or just ‘silly’), and a host of other things. Science Fiction has most definitely made me the person I am, and I have zero regrets on that point. I have no idea who I would be without it, but I’m pretty certain that I’d be a different and probably a very different person sitting here today. Am I a better person because of 50+ years of SF reading? That’s an interesting question and probably only answerable if we had access to alternate realities... which we probably don’t.... Probably...