Other Worlds – #SciFi #Favorites #Giveaway

Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay

Science fiction was one of my first loves. If you'd peeked into my room pretty much any afternoon when I was in school, you would have found me sprawled across the bed with my nose in a book, and it's quite likely it would have been sci fi. I couldn't have been more than seven or eight when I began exploring Eleanor Cameron's Mushroom Planet. Then I moved on to Heinlein's and Bradbury's visions of Mars (very different places!), and the world of Asimov's Foundation trilogy. I was in high school when I devoured Stranger in a Strange Land, fell head over heals for Valentine Michael Smith, and developed my enduring fascination with polyamory.

My husband introduced me to Philip K. Dick, Stanislaw Lem and Fritz Leiber. Then we became friends with a woman who taught English at a local university. She organized a scifi reading group. What a glorious year and a half that was! Every month we'd read a new book and discuss it, over delicious potluck dinners (with a strong emphasis on the desserts). I sampled a raft of new authors: Olivia Butler, Greg Bear, Sheri S. Tepper, Pat Cadigan, Harry Harrison, James Tiptree, David Brin... I was like a kid in a candy store!

I discovered that I much preferred “soft” science fiction – stories that start with some premise about society or history and then explore the consequences. For example, The Man in the High Castle, which is the first Dick book I read, turns on the notion that the United States and its allies lost World War II. The author then proceeds to build a world in which the Japanese and the Germans have divided up the American continent, and San Francisco is mostly Asian. (Gee, sounds like the present!) Another favorite is A Canticle for Lebowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr. In a post-apocalyptic future, devout communities of monks act as custodians for the mysterious knowledge and artifacts of vanished civilization. One of the most sacred of all texts is written in the hand of Saint Isaac Lebowitz and begins “gallon of milk/loaf of bread/...” Then there's Kate Wilhelm's The Year of the Cloud. I don't remember where I picked this novel up – it's obscure, far less well known than her masterpiece Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang – but I remember now, decades later, how it impressed me. The earth passes through a cloud of stellar dust. The dust has the effect of “thickening” water, turning it from liquid to a kind of sludge. Having posited this single fact, Wilhelm then proceeds to show how this turns society upside down, as humans (over ninety percent H₂O) die and usable water becomes increasingly scarce. I found the book chilling but totally plausible, once you had accepted the triggering event.

More recent discoveries include Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, a brilliant novel about environmental catastrophe set in Thailand (and showing a remarkable understanding of Thai culture) and Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, about a far future reminiscent of the narrow-minded clerical world of medieval times. I’m not a big fan of hard science fiction, but I recently took a friend’s recommendation and read Leviathan Wakes, the first installment of the series The Expanse. I have to admit it was a compelling read – so violent and gruesome that it gave me nightmares!

So when I began publishing, why didn't I write science fiction instead of erotica? Partly because I didn't dare! I doubted my ability to create a compelling yet believable alternative world. And I'd read so much science fiction by then, I felt as though all my ideas would be derivative.

I have written a few scifi titles – I’ll be showcasing them this week. Nevertheless, I feel like an amateur. Writing excellent erotica is tough, but I can’t help thinking that science fiction is an even more demanding genre.

What do you think? Remember that every comment you leave on any post this week counts as an entry in my SciFi Week giveaway!