Science Fiction, An Important Genre

Science Fiction (and Fantasy) is a hellova genre. Its what got me into reading a lot, turning me into a hardcore book worm. I used to read a lot of the classics around 2011, back when I was a college student. I was into things like Shakespeare, Moby Dick, Walden, and The Sound and Fury. Once I dropped out of college I stopped reading altogether for a while. Then around 2013, I started reading again, mostly inspired by science fiction.

I've read a lot of science fiction novels and short stories since then. Phillip K. Dick, Ursula K. LeGuin, William Gibson, Issac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Alfred Bester, Octavia Butler, Douglas Adams, Neal Stephenson, you name it. I began to build a love for ideas through these writers, at first enamored with the video game-ish ideas that can come from science fiction but eventually coming to an understanding that ideas from science fiction can help me to form ideas about real life. From Dune I learned about sociology and ecology. From Ursula K LeGuin I learned about anthropology. From Robert Heinlein I learned how conservative values can impact ones' writing. From Alfred Bester I learned that writing doesn't have to be fanciful to make an huge impact. These things are important.

Science Fiction is one of the most important genres today. Sci-Fi movies and novels help shape people's ideas and development of ideas when it comes to AI, automatons in the work place, consciousness, etc. This is an important ethical dilemma. Which is where science fiction has led me.

One day I was bored and typed in on google "oldest science fiction novels". It brought me to a Wikipedia page that listed Sir Tomas More's Utopia, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, Margaret Cavendash's Blazing World, and Kepler's Somnium.

I read Utopia and New Atlantis and didn't look back (although I want to read both of them again). At first the archaic writing style of the 1500s was super difficult to understand. However, I kept reading and reading until it eventually made "more" sense, which took quite a while and a lot of google dictionary searching. The ideas of Utopia and New Atlantis were very utopian, socialistic, and communistic. From there I read The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels, which I found on a pdf through google.

That's not even the end of this quest (thumbs up fantasy nerds). After I read up on some socialist/communist ideas I went even farther back to Thomas Hobbes' political economy-Leviathan, which I'm almost done with. From there I read Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy, a collection of essays in which he aims to prove the existence of God, quite an undertaking! For a while I became influenced by his writing, and even started to live a more holy life as a result. Holy as in being a nicer person, not fucking up at work, occasional prayer, diet and exercise. However, I am by no means religious. But the writers from the 1500s and 1600s who inspire me were mostly highly educated men from the Catholic schools.

Once my dad saw I was reading all of this without a context he recommended a great primer for me, which was Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy. This book has everything, as in every great idea of man and their originators from early man all the way to Marx and Engels. Russell is not only a philosopher who understands ideas but he's also an engaging writer that knows how to write in a highly educational way without being too technical, meaning anyone can understand if they put in the time and the effort. He's a mathematical person, this is very rare to find in people who are overly mathematical. The Russell book gave me a context for all the philosophy I was reading and will continue to read. If you read this book you will know more about ideas than most of the people you will run across in the general public. It was a great feeling once I finished it, its an 840 page book.

I also read classicist Madeline Miller's two novels Circe and The Song of Achilles, two books based on Greek mythology. From there I learned that I don't have to read fiction/nonfiction standard prose. I started reading the actual Iliad and from there started reading epic poetry of the Western canon. Now I'm reading Milton's Paradise Lost and Dante's Inferno. Although Miller's work isn't science fiction, not quite fantasy, it might as well be because its so highly unusual. Poetry is something I want to explore more of now.

Now we've completed the quest and earned some experience points. The point here is that science fiction has led me to the important things in Western literature. Its one of the most worthy genres out there despite what some people might say. A reader I was conversing with told me, "Science fiction gets a lot of shit but its done much for literature." I couldn't agree more.