Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Now that I've joined a book club...

My enthusiasm for reading has returned. A lot of it, granted, has been cheap YA reads, easy on the wallet and not very taxing on the mind either. But a few really good suggestions have come my way. One was Hugh Howey's 'Wool' series, which takes me back to my time with Asimov, or the Battlestar Galactica marathon that I did not so long ago. Books like that remind me that the best sci-fi, is not about technology, but about people. It's about how people react to change, or to lack of change; what would they do if ... something... was made possible - mind control, space flight, robots, immortality. These are not simply academic questions. Some of them could become real. And in some of the best sci-fi you can see things that have happened- history in a different context, stripped of your own preconceptions of it, allowing you to see it in a new light.