Why I'm not reading much Science Fiction any more

[skapusniak]

When I was a child our house was full of books.

Once I learned to read, which took me longer than it should have done due to my difficulty in getting my head around the radical concept that when a certain combination of letters was written on one page, and the same combination of letters was written on another page, they freakily both represented

Comments

[mmcirvin]

You know the old saying: the Golden Age of Science Fiction is twelve.

I used to think that was a put-down of the genre, but now I'm not so sure. Writing good stuff for twelve-year-olds is hard, and it doesn't mean that older people can't enjoy it. But twelve is probably somewhere around the age at which a smart person is most likely to seek out that radical kick in the brain, instead of feeling kicked into submission forty times a day.

I'm not at all sure that it's something specific to the times. I think John Brunner was trying to incorporate his combined fascination and weariness at that same sense of social overstimulation into his SF in the seventies. Come to think of it, he wrote a whole book riffing on Alvin Toffler's "Future Shock", which in a way was kind of a pessimistic Seventies take on the Singularity idea, that stuff was changing too quickly for people to internalize it. I remember watching a documentary inspired by "Future Shock" in school and just finding it flat and unconvincing; they were telling me cool stuff was bad and scary and expecting me to sympathize! Well, I was about twelve.