Sci-Fi Books I Owned and Loved
This might be the first generation ship story I read. I think I was. Followed closely by “Captive Universe” by Harry Harrison, and then “Non-Stop” by Brian Aldiss. Of the three I liked “Captive Universe” the best, although Heinlein’s novel always has a soft spot in my heart for being the first. On re-reading all three, I still like “Captive Universe” the best for its sheer originality, and then “Orphans of the Sky” (apparently it was a fix-up novel but I never spotted that), and lastly Aldiss’s novel, which is a bit too arch and self-knowing to be really enjoyable as a piece of SF as opposed to social satire.
Non-stop has a brilliant setting. The characters are obviously in a spaceship, but they have lost sight of the spaceship and its function, so the story has this great dichotomy between what the characters know and what the reader knows. However, on re-reading the book very recently I was struck by how oddly English and parochial the small community was, almost as if Aldiss was descibing the goings-on in a small English village. While that might be a valid specualtion about what a generation ship might degenerate into, it does not quite sit right for me.
Honestly, the opening for this book had me completely foxed. I was never one to read the cover blurb to get an idea about the book. I just looked at the cover, made a decision, and plunged in. I liked the enormous spaceship on the front of this edition of the book. It seemed to suggest some kind of epic space journey and yet, there it was, hovering over a lush green valley, so clearly something strnage was going on, but what that might be was unclear. And it remained so for the opening scenes in the book, which were all about this Axtec settlement and a strange fire breathing creature.
Gene Wolfe’s “The Book of the New Sun” series was magical and transformative for me. These are books where I remember exactly where I bought them, in a small independent bookshtore in Oxford, UK, which (searching on Google Maps) no longer seems to exist, sadly. I purchased the first of the series, read it,and was right back for the next. I think I then had to wait for the third. The fourth in the series i did not find until some time later. All four were gripping. This was a perfect mix of myth and science fiction. A world where the future and the past were so entangled you could hardly tell them apart. Wofle did such a great job of this that many readers have mistaken the books as fantasty, and some as science fantasy, whereas this is hardcore science fiction but prsented from inside the world that has regressed into the myths of its own past that those myths have become fantasy.
Isaac Asimov was a mainstay of my pre-teen and teen sci-fi reading habit. The Foundation Trilogy and the Robot series were, for my younger self, works of genius. Oddly, I was never quite so taken by his short stories and could never quite understand the plaudits given to his Nightfall story, which seemed a rather stiff and manufactured scenario, whcih I didn’t really believe. Now older, and more cynical, I suppose, I find Asimov’s writing rather shallow, and most especially his characters. Except for one novel, the love of which has always stayed with me — The End of Eternity. Here, his imagined guardians of time patrolling eternity, create one of the most powerful time travel narratives since Wells’ The Time Machine, and we are given a strong love story and a necessary betryal.
My father was forced to get rid of our television when it became clear at the age of eight that I could not read, or, at least, I could not read books that any self-respecting eight-year-old should be able to read. Because we did not have a television, I was forced to raid my Dad’s library of secondhand paperback books he’d collected from jumble sales and secondhand bookstores. Thankfully, he had a great collection of Robert Heinlein’s early books and these became central to my growing love of science fiction as a preteen. I remember The Star Beast fondly, and was surprised on re-reading it recently how much of the book is wrapped up in the long courtroom scene and its associated legalese, and how relatively little Lummox features — although she has considerable impact when she does!
Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin (an American writer and critic) was a book I read very early on in my sci-fi adventure and it won me over, completely. The story was so believable it felt like experiencing the world as a 13-year-old girl, through the eyes of the protagonist Mia Havero (I must have been about 12). I re-read it again recently and found it entertaining and charming, but clearly a piece of fiction best for younger readers. (Mia and another young teen do have sex.) I likely read the Sphere edition of the book as I don’t remember anything distinctive about the front cover, and I certainly/luckily had no clue that it was about a 13-year-old girl. The edition I wish I had read was the ACE version featuring Leo and Diane Dillon’s cover .
