Welcome to the innaugural edition of the Sci-Fi/Fantasy Book Club here on Readers & Book Lovers. We're going to be doing a couple of things here: discussing themes in science fiction and fantasy; in-depth discussions of specific books and authors; different sub-genres; history and development of the genre, etc. That's more than a couple, isn't it. Bear with me.
To begin with, perhaps let's start by introducing ourselves, and telling how each of us discovered and became interested in the Fiction of the Fantastic. And since the journey of a thousand miles begins by forgetting where you put the map, let me go first:
My Mom likes to tell the story of when I was about in Kindergarten and a Sunday School teacher asked my class what a Pastor was. I was the Pastor's kid, so of course my hand shot up first. "A Pastor," I said, "is someone who can watch The Outer Limits and not have bad dreams!"
My Dad was a Lutheran minister, and he was also an avid fan of science fiction. In our basement we had a huge bookshelf full of paperbacks: Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, E.E. "Doc" Smith, Ray Bradbury, A.E. van Vogt and more. Although the first science fiction book I think I ever read was Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea from the school library, I soon went on to reading Heinlein's Space Cadet, Asimov's Lucky Starr series and "Doc" Smith's Skylark of Space.
Strangely enough, although I found much in those books to challenge my Lutheran upbringing, this never prompted me to reject my Faith. Perhaps this was because I was never taught, the way some of my friends in college seemed to have been, that God was an Enemy of the Imagination. I knew what my Dad believed; and I knew he liked SF. So I tackled those imagination-sparking paperbacks and wrestled with their subversive, heretical ideas the way Jacob wrestled with the angel. And I found ideas in them that actually complimented my beliefs and gave me an outside perspective that deepened them.
I had few friends in high school who shared my interest in Science Fiction. One of them was the girl who played bass clarinet in band a row ahead of me and who used to bug me on the bus. She loaned me her paperback noveliztion of Star Wars on our first day of high school. I suppose I should have known then that I'd be fated to marry her, but we don't always recognize these things.
I belonged to a Science Fiction Club in college, and contributed to their fanzine. Although some of my friends were rather snobbish about "Hard Science Fiction" and dismissive of "Fantasy", I could see it all as part of one large tapestry of the Imagination encompassing both plausible extrapolations and wild fancy.
My budget for buying books has shrunk in recent years, as has the time I spend at the library. Most of the reading I do this days is of old friends from my own collection; even larger than Dad's. Part of it I'll be sharing in this series; and I hope you'll join me and share from your own readings as well.
NEXT WEEK: Hard SF vs. Squishy Fantasy; the Mohs Scale of Science Fiction, and What are These Wizards and Pink Unicorns Doing Here?