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I’ve always called myself a fan of science fiction literature.  And I do enjoy it, to be sure, but upon introspection, I’m not certain now that I’m deserving of the title Fan.  It’s a simple matter of whether my actions back up my words, and to be rightfully called a Fan, I think one must read voraciously from the pool of any literary genre or mode, and I realize that this is not something I have done.

Certainly, I read a fair number of children’s books that could be called science fiction when I was a child, and from grade school through high school read every science fiction-y novel that Michael Crichton wrote, and went through a Star Wars Expanded Universe phase in high school, and read the odd H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, and C.S. Lewis (the Space Trilogy) growing up.  But in March of last year, when Arthur C. Clarke died, it dawned on me that this was a man who was held up as a godfather of modern science fiction and I had never read a single story that came from his hand.  In quick succession, it also dawned on me that I had read precious little of any the works by the big names of science fiction - Heinlein and Asimov, Herbert, Dick, Zelazny, Ellison…the list went on.

I resolved to begin catching up on all that I had missed since childhood, to read all those books whose covers I knew so well from more than a decade of browsing through the SF sections at my local libraries but whose contents were still complete mysteries to me.  Should I start with Clarke and his contemporaries, I wondered?  Well, no, because I wanted to know who had come before their time, who had influenced them; I like to do that, to trace evolutions of movements within the arts.  So I checked out a few books from my library and looked up the history of SF on Wikipedia and traced my finger back through the years - through the age of the pulps, 1920s-1930s, to the heyday of Verne  and Wells in the late 1800s, back to Shelley, and even earlier, discovering that, as it is commonly accepted, the roots of what we know as science fiction literature lie nearly five hundred years in our past, in Thomas More’s Utopia, and in other proto-science fiction works in the centuries that followed.  I made a list and I’ve started reading.

Why would I gaze that far back, and amass for myself such a great amount of catching up to do, when I already know of more books that have piqued my interest, within and without SF, than I’ll be able to read in my lifetime?  There are several reasons, the first being, as I stated, that I like to trace the genealogies of ideas, of modes.  More importantly, though I never read as much science fiction as I liked to think I did while growing up, there is the undeniable fact that what has always most excited me about literature, about film, about music, about any art form, is what happens when humans use their imagination to probe at mysteries beyond our current comprehension or collective experience.  I like films that show me things I’ve never seen before, music that makes me feel as though I’ve been transported to virgin dimensions, books that consider startling and wondrous possibilities.  I am thrilled by the “What If?”s.

Science Fiction is a much more complex animal than a simple matter of asking “what if?” and writing about it, and I’m sure I’ll explore the facets of the genre in greater detail as I read up through the centuries.  I will keep notes on what I find in the different eras of SF, on what I like and don’t like, what I think is effective and what is not, but most importantly, I look forward to enjoying an almost endless variety of good yarns.  Wish me bon voyage.

-Brenton