Early Days
Existential questions from a precocious 8 year old
Existential questions from a precocious 8 year old
I learned to read young. I'm not particularly clever, but I had a squint in those days and the post-operative cure was lots of close work to train the "lazy" eye: reading was the chosen method and like many habits learned young I simply took it from there.
Quickly outgrowing the children and "Young Adult" sections of the school amnd town libraries I quickly worked through the major classics, finding most of them pretentious and boring, with the exceptions of "The Magus" and the whole Hobbit / Lord of the Rings thing, Watership Down and Ian Fleming, Wilbur Smith and of course Captain WE Johns, famously the creator of Biggles.
But tucked away in my Prep school's surprisingly progressive library was a small section of Science Fiction, and I quickly read every single one of them. It was the time of the Moon landings and these tales of post-NASA adventuring fuelled my passion of dreaming about the future, questioning the Status Quo and thinking about where the future might lie.
Successive English teachers throughout my education were driven mad by wildly imaginative presentations, often of hugely esxcessive length and complexity. I'm sure they dreaded the day after English Homework night: what the hell had Ballard come up with this time?
More realistic pastimes whittled away at the time I had to spend writing but I moved on to the heavyweights: Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Douglas Adams, Frederik Pohl and Larry Niven. Frank Herbert made the cut for a while, but by the 6th Dune book it was all getting a little ridiculous (I still don't quite understand why Hollywood is obsessed with Dune, though? It is completely unfilmable as most of the interesting stuff is going on inside people' heads)
What they were capable of doing was not only reflecting concerns about current issues: Vietnam, nuclear war, overpopulation, systems of government but raising concerns about what was coming down the line and what we ought to be doing about it and that has always been the hook for me. Not little green men, killer robots or Westerns in space but thoughtful space opera.
It turned out I wasn't the only one: Iain Banks grew an "M" in the middle of his name and actually wrote SF that verged upon proper literature-hood. Of course the "serious" critics laughed in his face but he was right: SF can be highbrow and thoughtful as well. Stephen Baxter, Neil Asher and Peter F Hamilton proved peple still want to read proper Space Opera.