One of the other Nature Network bloggers has suggested blogging for World Book Day, today 6 March.
(I gather, ironically, this is only World Book Day here in the UK and one or two other places, as the official date falls on school holidays, and school teachers like the excuse to do silly things. At the place my wife works, they’ve all gone into school in pyjamas to celebrate World Book Day. I love education.)
I want to take the opportunity to celebrate the books that got me interested in science. These weren’t popular science books. The genre was in its infancy back then. They were science fiction.
In literary circles SF gets a lot of stick, but I rejoice in the way it expanded my horizons and made me think. It would be impossible to pick out a favourite, but I’d like to highlight a handful of very special contributors to the stimulation of my interest in science:
Isaac Asimov – The Foundation Trilogy – okay, the characters are solid wood, but it’s packed with ideas and sense of wonder. I can’t help but think the whole psychohistory thing got me interested in Operational Research.
James Blish – Flying Cities Quartet – very influential on me as a youth. Again combines amazing ideas and a huge, dramatic sweep.
Pohl & Kornbluth – The Space Merchants – funny, insightful and cutting.
Keith Roberts – Pavane – wonderfully thought provoking alternative history, set in a Britain with no Reformation.
... I could go on indefinitely. Good SF stimulates the imagination and the excitement of science. That can’t be bad.
By all means rush out and by a big pile of popular science books for world book day (see the Popular Science website for recommendations) – but give science fiction a thought too. At its best, it is glorious.
When I was young, my interest in science was highly influenced by a series of SF books. I wish I could remember the name of them or their author. Maybe you read them too? My idea is that the author was Hugh someone? Anyway, the books were a series about British astronauts. In the first one, the astronaut (I think a boy? Called Chris?) flies to the Moon. In the next, Venus, and so on. Each book told the story of a voyage to a different planet in the Solar System and was an adventure about what was found there (I think several astronauts are added to the team as the books progress), or things going wrong technically to the rocket, etc. There was quite a bit of detail about planning the voyages and the politics of space flight. I loved these books and wanted to give them to my own children, but as I can only remember the content and not the title/author, I am stuck!
I still remember, as a child, my Dad reading H. G. Wells to me. The Magic Shop. Aepyornis Island. Great stuff. Much later, when I was about 11 or 12 and feeling the first stirrings of rising sap, I used to walk from my school to my Dad’s office where he used to park me in an attic room to do my homework, before he’d drive us home. I shared this attic with a typist called Margaret, who passed me the books she read in her lunch hour, when she’d finished with them. Lots of Asimov (Foundation trilogy, I, Robot and so on, all Panther SF paperback imprints), Arthur C Clarke and the like. It helped that Margaret was a babe – an absolute dreamboat. So my early love for SF was highly coloured by sex and teenage yearnings. But isn’t everything?
I was always an Arthur C. Clarke devotee. I spent a whole year reading no one else. Again, wooden characters, but that didn’t matter. I particularly recommend the Rama series (movie coming soon).
Maxine – do you mean the Lucky Starr series of juvenile SF that Asimov wrote under the name of Paul French? Titles included Lucky Starr, Space Ranger, Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus etc etc.
they’ve all gone into school in pyjamas to celebrate World Book Day
That. Sounds. Amazing.
I would have to buy pyjamas to take part though…
I liked Asimov a lot – for being a polymath as much as his stories – but could never get into the Foundation series. I want(ed) to make Caves of Steel into a film, though.
My 17-year-old was supposed to wear pyjamas yesterday, not for world book day but for rag week. (Today she’s gone dressed up as Goldlocks). However, although she does own PJs ;-), she missed that opportunity as she went instead to a debate at the Imperial War Museum about whether or not the USA is an imperialist power (or something), for which PJs were deemed unnecessary. An exciting life they lead these days.
Sorry, Goldilocks.
I liked the first (original) Foundation series—when I was 12 or so I read every SF book in print but since then have read virtually none. I did try the much later sequelae to Foundation but did not like those—possibly they were written by one of Asimov’s franchisees by then and not the man himself.
One of my favourites as a child was Mr Tomkins meets (?) the atom, by George Gamow. I had lots of science books which I really loved, including a huge one which I called BLOGGY (turned out to be a juvenile misreading of the title, but so it was always called in our house). There was one very good series “inside…..” (the atom, etc).
Henry—thanks for the suggestion, and have had a look- I missed it completely when reading the comment thread as your words are obliterated by a picture in my browser, but have just spotted them. It looks an interesting series, but no, that’s not it. The series I am thinking of is a much more low-key affair—very British (but Australia and Woomera feature I recall), and kind of shoestring. Definitely much more serious minded than space rangers, etc. I do wish I could remember the author…..
I was more interested in biology than physics and space travel, and I read a lot of John Wyndham – the Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos etc. I also devoured all of the James Herriot books, which aren’t technically science fiction, but got me wanting to be a vet, which channelled me into other areas of biology.
I also loved Eva, by Peter Dickinson. It was set in a very crowded, polluted future in which doctors were able to transfer a girl’s memories and personality into a chimp’s body after a car accident. I must have read it 10 times and would highly recommend it for any teenage girls interested in science, conservation and zoology.
Maxine – I’m really racking my brains now!!
Cath – I’d certainly include Wyndham in my top 10 early influences – I only didn’t include it in the list above as Wyndham’s too far down the bookcase for me to have spotted when I did a quick scan.
(I also missed him because my other favourites down at the far end of the alphabet – Gene Wolfe who is up there with the great writers for his pure skill, and Roger Zelazny for huge fun – are more fantasy than SF).
My all-time favourite science book is King Solomon’s Ring by Konrad Lorenz. I loved especially his description of the water-shrew always taking the same route even if it was inefficient. It also held a warm connection with one of my favourite “Just So Stories” – “The Butterfly that Stamped”.
We own most of Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke’s writings though I arrived at these relatively later in life; for me, Asimov is excellent for an-idea-a-page, but they don’t re-read well, however some of Clarke’s short stories will make me cry every time.
Asimov, Clarke, Wyndham – all the golden oldies. You guys need a little churchin’ up! Things have moved on since then. Recent SF is a veritable explosion of talent, and I’ve read lots of wonderful Sf written in the past twenty years or so – even the past ten – from names such as Alastair Reynolds, Charles Stross, Iain M Banks, Peter F Hamilton, Vonda McIntyre, Nalo Hopkinson, Jeff Crook, Bruce Sterling … I’d recommend that all y’all get yourselves a copy of my wonderful SF anthology (though I say so myself) Futures from Nature, a collection of 100 of the very short stories published in Nature’s award-winning Futures SF column, which is a kind of taste-menu for the best and brightest in today’s SF. And yes, Arthur C Clarke has a story in there, too…
I loved Wyndham, too. I read all his books, avidly, when far too young—they really scared me, but fascinated me at the same time. I have quite a few in the house now, for my daughters.
I see nobody has identified my space series, though, I had hoped someone might have enjoyed the same books and have a better memory for authors than me. ;-(
Greg Bear does some good stuff too (see Henry, I’m not entirely mired in the past!)
It was Greg Bear’s book Eon that opened my eyes to modern SF. I had the great good fortune to have met the man at SciFoo in 2007—along with Kin Stanley Robinson and neal Stephenson.
Henry – I’m not knocking the modern guys (though I don’t think many are in the same league), but we were talking about early influences, which when you get to my age can’t be later than the 60s!
Point taken, Brian, but I find that things I’ve read more recently, or even now, feed into my thinking and my writing.