Fiction – Page 21 – Auxiliary Memory

Reading Beyond Science Fiction

Years ago I wrote an essay about what where the classic books of science fiction. I later made it into an web site called The Classics of Science Fiction. I always meant to use the same techniques to build a web site that reveals the all-time classic books of general literature, and not just limit the search to one genre. I finally got that site started at Classic Booklists. It’s just a baby step, because my friends and I hope to do a lot more with the idea.

Until I was fifty, I mostly read science fiction books. Sure, I sampled far and wide, but I stuck to the tried and true genre I grew up with, always looking for my new sense-of-wonder fix. Then I discovered audio books at Audible.com and my reading habits completely changed. Back then, there just wasn’t that much science fiction offered on audio, and so I had to be open to new kinds of books. I started listening to classic English novels, best sellers, modern American literary works, works of history, biography, science and philosophy, anything that was promoted as a great book. I quickly discovered sense-of-wonder doesn’t have to be about rocketships.

Listening to The Bible, and The Bible is the bedrock of all classic books, is hearing the voices of primitive people, the voices of men and women at the dawn of history. The Bible is a gateway to the mind of man before there were concepts like science, history, mathematics, astronomy and so on. Sure, there’s the whole religious angle, but that’s the least interesting take. Just listen to the stories and always remember to ask: Who is telling this story and why? You will experience The Bible as a series of evolutionary stories that do far more to explain our physical world than the metaphysical. It was all about national politics. The Old Testament is very much like the Koran, in that it explains the psychology of radical fundamentalism, which isn’t about heaven or hell, but here and now.

When you read classic books always follow the motivation. Whether fiction or nonfiction, there’s always a mind at work. No matter how engrossing a story is, step back and look for the narrator’s slight-of-hand. There are two narrators to watch for tricks, the one within the words telling story, and the unseen other, the actual writer of the words – and trust neither. For example, within The Bible, who is telling the story about Moses and Aaron? The Bible is often referred to as the word of God, but God doesn’t narrate this story. Did Moses have a PR man cranking out press releases? Did a BC Billy Graham tell stories about Moses in sermons? Did the early chamber of commerce for Israel hammer out their tale for national unity?

Reading Jane Austen will only take you back two hundred years, but she will teach you about the mind of women from any time. Again, what is Miss Austen’s motivation? Is Pride and Prejudice a timeless handbook for romance or for gold digging? Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald tells us about the origins of the 20th century American mind at the ground level. Every French, German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese novel opens up a mental beachhead into new culture. This is all mind bending, and as mind bending as science fiction feels when you discover it at thirteen.

Each classic is like time traveling to a place and time – for instance Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie takes you to Chicago of the eighteen nineties and shows you a world as far out as any science fictional world. Compare it to Empire Star by Samuel R. Delany and you will see what I mean. They are both about rubes from the country, or in the SF case, a backward planet, struggling to survive in the big city.

American history is really an extension of English history, and reading classic English novels is like working with an Freudian psychologist to explore our hive mind childhood. When you read far and wide in literature and philosophy, you’ll realize that the history of humanity is like the evolution of one great being.

We have to accept Isaac Newton when he said, “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants,” as not just true for scientists, but true for everyone. How far you see across time and space depends on the pile of books from which you view reality. Harry Potter novels might be the best of fun, but they won’t help you see very far. On the other hand, they are great books because they aren’t about magic, but contemporary adolescence.

A classic book, a great book, a masterpiece of literature, will educate its readers about the past, and at the same time they reveal a timeless way of seeing the present. A classic book begs to be read again and again, because each reading will reveal more secrets. A classic novel will draw you into history and you will feel like your life is growing in two ways, one forward from your individual birth, and the second, a life that grows backwards, roaming further and further towards our cultural birth. Reading books from the 1950s lets you grok the 1940s, that make sense of the 1930s – and after awhile it’s the 1790s, or the Italian Renaissance, or 400 BC. Suddenly, all of history becomes your stomping grounds.

Reading classic books is like assembling a map of reality one jigsaw piece at a time. In the early part of the 20th century people like Mortimer Adler came up with the educational philosophy of the Great Books, and colleges built liberal arts curriculums around The Great Books of the Western World. This later evolved into Harold Bloom‘s idea of The Western Canon. Of course, these lists of great books require a lifetime of study, more than most people ever want to pursue.

That’s when I got the idea of collecting many such booklists of recommended reading of classic books, hoping to find the essential volumes revealed through consensus. I’m just starting with ClassicBooklists.com. With the help of my friends Mike and Heather I hope to expand it in many revealing ways. I’ve started reading books about books, such as, Leave Me Along, I’m Reading by Maureen Corrigan, 1000 Books To Change Your Life by TimeOut.com, The Book That Changed My Life edited by Roxanne J. Coady & Joy Johannessen, and the epic, 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, edited by Peter Boxall.

The more you read about books the more it’s obvious that no one person, or editors or scholars or poll of fans have an idea of what the perfect classic booklist should be. The Classics of Science Fiction is built from 28 lists, and the resultant list is from any book that shares recommendations from 7 or more lists. Those 193 books represent quite a consensus. So far I have 12 lists for the Classic Booklist site. It will take time to build it up. I plan to add The Classics of Science Fiction list to it next, so we can compare SF books to recommendations for general literature.

So stay tuned.

Jim

What is Your Personal Science Fiction Fantasy?

What is your personal science fiction fantasy? Let’s say you die and wake up in front of a superior being and he/she/it tells you to pick your next life, what would it be? You can pick anything from reality, your own imagination or from any fictional world you’ve encountered. It’s a big multiverse out there – where would you’d like to go?

Would you want to time travel to the epic past to be another Solomon with a harem of hundreds? How about just taking a chance by asking to be born a thousand years in the future. Military SF is popular so would you volunteer to join up and serve in an interstellar military brigade? Does being a pioneering colonist on Mars inspire your dream time? I know, ask to be a rock star in England in 1965.

Now think hard. Use your imagination. You don’t want to be Dudley Moore in Bedazzled.

All of us spend a lot of time reading science fiction escaping our mundane life in exciting stories of the future and other worlds, but I’m reminded of a title of a Philip K. Dick book: What if Our World is Their Heaven? How do you know that the life you are living right now isn’t the one you picked the last time you died?

If you think about this for awhile you’ll see you will want to be reborn into a life of opportunity and not restrictions. The reason we all aren’t still living some Old Testament fantasy is because its so limiting. If you look at the history of mankind on Earth you will see the evolution of diversity of being. Imagine if reincarnation is true – but instead of us all trying to get off the wheel of life and death we all anxiously die desiring to come back for more and more and more. The Hindu believe we return to this life because of the sin of desire. Obviously we’ve embraced desire over returning to Oneness.

The philosophical purpose of reincarnation is to provide a mechanism by which we improve our souls. So should our science fiction fantasies follow this concept? Do I love Have Space Suit – Will Travel because it’s a blueprint for improving my being? Or do we merely choose our stories seeking to diversify our desires?

Growing up my number one science fiction fantasy was to live on Mars. If I died and met that superior being now that wouldn’t be my wish. No, my current wish is very different. I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating my naval while listening to pounding hard rock music that stirs my emotions and vibrates my neurons into a higher state of consciousness and I know what I would tell that very superior being.

I’d tell ole SB to put me back in my own life starting in 1963 so I could live my life over and try again. I’d want it to be the ultimate “if I knew then what I know now” experience. I don’t know if the laws of reincarnation allow for reincarnating into oneself but that’s what I would want.

Now this isn’t because I thought my life was so great and I’m unnaturally attached to it. First off, I hope I would do everything different. Sure being a colonist on Mars would be damn exciting but to be honest, I don’t have the Right Stuff. I think those Hindus were right, the idea is to improve and not just party hardy. I think a do-over would teach me a lot. Maybe it would take several repeats of this life before I do have the Right Stuff to go on.

Now this isn’t avoiding making a choice in front of that superior being. This is a very active science fiction fantasy. Log some iPod time and fantasize this out for yourself. Imagine your own do-over and think about all those decisions you made where you could have followed the other path.

With every novel we read we step out of our own life into another world. With every movie we watch we reject this reality for fictional moments in another. What does this tell us beyond showing us we have a desire to escape? Has reality has just gotten too slow and boring for us and we need imagination to make it more exciting? This reality is pretty far out. As far as we know Earth is the most happening place in all the dimensions we know about.

Reality has always been vastly more complex than any fiction. Remember that when you’re making your wish in front of that superior being. No one has ever imagined a Heaven better than Earth. Think about that. Think about those poor Muslim bastards who kill themselves for seventy-two virgins. Does fresh quim really define paradise or is it just an unimaginative wish? Why do so many on this planet want to believe this world is shit and the next one Heaven?

I don’t believe in superior beings or lives after this one. Every day I am reborn into the same exact reality as yesterday. Every moment is a then where I know what I know now. I am facing the same decisions I made in 1963. Mars is always there if I take the time to invent a way to go.

Are our science fiction fantasies escapism or planning time? What is your science fiction fantasy? What does it tell you?

Jim

The energy for this essay was fueled by:

“The Weight of the World” by Neil Young
“(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult
“Thank You Friends” by Big Star

Science Fiction Overload

I’ve always loved science fiction but keeping up with the genre is a big damn job. I constantly worry I’m going to miss a breakthrough novel with the impact of Neuormancer or The Life of Pi or Replay just because I was wasn’t keeping up with the times.

As a young bookworm I read several books a week at a time when the science fiction section at the bookstore was a wire rack at the drugstore where I bought my Popular Science and Mad Magazines. There just wasn’t that many new books being published every month and the real focus was on feeding an indiscriminate reading appetite. Reading the book review sections in Amazing, Fantastic, Analog, Galaxy, If, and F&SF kept me perfectly up-to-date on the world of science fiction publishing in 1968, but it’s not enough for 2008.

Every year now Locus Magazine reports there are over 2,000 SF&F books being published as well as a large variety of magazines, graphic novels, online zines, ebooks and other outlets of SF&F storytelling. The field is long past the size that I can comprehend. I’m a small town bookworm living in a giant metropolis of fantastic fiction. Last night I was watching a documentary on Discovery HD about Miami, the town I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. My father’s family moved there in the 1920s. The show made me realize just how much of the city and its glamorous history I had never noticed even though I had lived in many places in Dade County. If I went back home I’d be just another tourist. That’s how I feel about SF&F today. I can’t believe I miss so much.

What I need is a Lonely Planet Guide to the vast hyperactive country of science fiction. For years that was Locus Magazine’s job but even it overwhelms me today. Thank God for the Internet, and a special prayer of thanks to the guys who invented RSS. This year I’ve been on a voyage of discovery to find just the right RSS feeds that are easy to read and reduce the fire-hose of SF information overload down to a water fountain burble.

Of course I added the RSS feed to my old favorite Locus Magazine but strangely enough I was disappointed with its cryptic posts in my Outlook inbox. Some RSS feeds send the entire article and others just send snack-size snippets to entice you to click on a hyperlink and jump over to their site to eat the whole whole meal. The bite-size phrases from Locus seldom get me to byte. I do click now and then and sometimes discover perfect little gems like 2007 SF/F/H Books on Year’s Best Lists, which cross-tabs several review sites to list the books that have gotten the most recommendations for best books of 2007 (first posted on 2/13/8).

This same article was written up by SF Signal on 2/20/8. SF Signal is a fantastic web site that very successfully reports on the most tasty data bits about SF&F. It serves the same function for our genre as Slashdot does for computer news. I’m now trying to decide if I can abandon my RSS feed for Locus Magazine and depend on SF Signal to keep me up-to-date about anything worthy that Locus does publish. In other words a plain RSS feed is not always perfect, so maybe a meta-feed is even better.

Of course the best solution would a single RSS feed that notified me from many sites just the stories I would likely love to read. So if I could train my feed from SF Signal for just the kinds of stories I want to read then that would really save me some major time, but that might be too science fictional of an idea. What I’m wishing for is a reading robot companion that gets to know me perfectly and then spoon feeds me just the right stories.

The trouble is I can only read maybe 7-10 science fiction and fantasy novels a year and maybe another 20-25 short stories. (OK, yes SF&F is great, but there’s actually more healthy stuff to consume too, like science and history books, so I have to limit my SF&F candy.) Logically I should ignore all books but the very best sellers and also read one SF best of the year anthology to sample the best of each year. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work well doing that. I can dip into several best of anthologies and only find a few real nuggets among the fool’s gold. Not that a diamond to me won’t be cut glass to someone else, or vice versa. And many best sellers are less than filling to me.

What I’m learning to do is search out blogs by various SF&F bookworms with the hope I’ll find a few taste-clones of myself. I’m currently reading:

These readers don’t have my exact reading habits but they read much slower than review sites and they comment about books in a low key personal manner that I identify with. This slows the pace down for finding books. I hope to add other blogs in the future. I find it very easy to keep up with their blog feeds and figure I can eventually handle maybe ten or twelve blogging friends this way. It’s a virtual book club and we chat with each other without even knowing the other is in the room, so to say.

I also find speciality sites like The Internet Review of Science Fiction and SF Audio to be very helpful too. They cover more stuff than I ever want to handle, but I can easily pick and choose. SF Audio has a good RSS feed with enough content in each post so I quickly click yay or nay with my mouse. IRoSF is formatted like a magazine so it’s easy to pick and choose in the TOC, however I think I would like it better if they sent out RSS feeds of their full stories. Although that might not be what they want after creating such a nice magazine format, but my desire does fit with the new reading paradigm of the RSS.

When it comes down to it we spend a lot of time reading emails, so RSS feeds simply spoon feed us reading material in email size bites. I wish my Kindle was more of a true RSS reader. I haven’t experimented with it using RSS feeds, but I will. The Kindle is even easier to read than my Outlook client. And that’s what my needs comes down to, an easy method to shovel just the right words into my head. I’m getting old, so I can’t process as many words as I want, but these futuristic times really do have the technologies to do less with more. Imagine if I could get all my reading through email sized chunks of words?

Sure, there are downsides to the emailization of reading. It’s all fast food consumption and nothing is saved for studying. What some clever programmer needs to do is marry Outlook with MediaWiki. That way we could read and digest our words into something for long term memory.

I wish I had more time to read more books. Reading reviews at least show me the myriad of ideas being explored in the world of SF&F. To get an idea of what I mean just read January 2008: Short Fiction at IRoSF – there’s a reason why the old magazines were called Amazing Stories or Astounding Stories of Super Science and Fantastic Tales. There’s a lot more to SF than spaceships and more to fantasy than hobbits.

SF&F are the genres that require their writers to think up wild ideas, and boy to they ever. And me, I’d love to explore than all, but I can’t. I just can’t. So what I want to do is find the most sense of wonder I can for my limited reading time.

Jim