When I was in college, I fell in love with movies and delved headfirst into trying to understand and appreciate the medium. 2001: A Space Odyssey served as a graduate course of my exploration. I sort of taught myself how to appreciate what would have previously been impenetrable. In a diluted way, I think I’m doing something similar, but with novels. I’m reading far more than I ever have before, and am branching out into areas that were often intimidating or bewildering. So it’s only natural that […]
Suddenly I’m that lady who talks about mystic aliens and stuff on subway.
There are two things I like to do which usually give me a somewhat eccentric aura if seen by strangers: hug trees and, out of nowhere, stop and look at the sky. The cosmos always fascinated me. Not only its colors, its stars, its movements, but also what I can only see with my imagination. So, nothing more obvious than my interest in sci-fi. I am part of a book club with some friends and Childhood’s end was the first book that we read in 2017. […]
Bowman’s in Space (Alternate title: So many pizza gifs, so little time)
Perhaps it is a credit to my stupidity, perhaps a flaw in the genre that I was willing to read 145 pages of foreign world and odd references before I noticed that 3001 is actually the 4th book in the series (maybe the word “final” could have been a clue there, hmm? No?). Perhaps it is Arthur C. Clarkes brilliance that it didn’t matter at all. This book is a delight. “Do you believe in ghosts, Dim?” “Certainly not: but like every sensible man, I’m […]
An Elevator to Heaven
There are people within our time that just can see way ahead in the future and do some genius predictions, even though normally they end up wrong on the time frame. Take Phillip K. Dick and his androids from “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” that later became Blade Runner. The technology is right, if there weren’t any moral restraints on our cientists, but the timing is wrong. Arthur C. Clarke was a futurist. He loved to try and predict what would mankind be doing […]
The only rival to the cold detachment of science is the cold detachment of Arthur C. Clarke
Years ago, while still in college, my girlfriend and I went on a year-long Star Trek binge by renting all of The Next Generation, Deep Space 9, and Voyager from Netflix. One night, after watching a few episodes, I went outside to put the disc (this was before Netflix was predominantly a streaming service) in the mailbox, and noticed the night sky emblazoned by a full moon. I stood beneath the pristine glow of that autumnal moon and pondered our place in the universe. I […]
In pain of a heart forbade to fly. But you learn to say goodbye.
I knew very little about this book going into it other than it was considered to be a Science Fiction classic and that SyFy recently produced a miniseries adaptation of it. When it popped up on sale for $1.99 on Kindle shortly after that, I figured it would be a good time to fill in some of the gaps in my SciFi reading (long story short. My parents were SciFi nerds. I rebelled by being a horror/true crime fanatic). I’m glad I waited until I […]