I’ve always been a sucker for science fiction. I picked it up very early - early teens and must have been some of the first ‘big’ books that I read. I can remember devouring Jeffrey Archer’s Kane and Abel at thirteen, going on a tear for some time along the same lines and winding up with Robert Heinlein’s Red planet and dabbling in the original Dr. Who book series. I eventually came across some of Asimov’s Hugo winner compendiums and the rest is history.
I’m not obsessive about sci-fi. I’m more classic, digging Dr. Who, Battlestar Gallactica, Stargate and the TV series that came out of that. My only anomalous tick for TV based stories is the lack of love for Star Trek, and this is really because it was not available on TV while growing up in Nigeria. On the more classic book front, which is really more my speed, I now feel lost when I walk into the local Border’s and walk between the double rows of science fiction – its frankly intimidating. Where to start? I have now taken to getting my fix from Gardner Dozois’s sommelier like treatment of the ‘year’s best science fiction’ – buy one thing, get several high quality dozes of the good stuff and all is well with the world. I’ve also gone and dug up a lot of the works of Philip K. Dick. From the Sixth Day to Minority Report to Next (based on The Golden Man), I started noting the quality of the man’s output and I figured the written stuff would be even more powerful and ripe.
So why Sci-Fi? I’ve idly wondered why I like the genre myself and Ezinne obviously does not get it. It only recently crystallized from reading this article by Clive Thompson - Why Sci-Fi Is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing. As he comments: “…. brings me to my point. If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas.” I completely agree. Science fiction it 3 dimensional and sometime even 4 dimensional literature. It’s what quantum mechanics is to the discipline of physics. The only flaw is that sometime the prose sucks. But hey, you can always read something else.