I was fortunate to grow up a reader.
I had literate parents, didn't grow up in a neighborhood filled with kids, and discovered at an early age the pleasures of curling up with a book. I'm eternally grateful for this, but less grateful for the way that school shove "great books" down my throat.
I have a distinct memory of The Great Gatsby, or rather of the classroom discussion that ensued when I argued with some force that the light on the dock (a "symbol") might mean something other than the teacher proscribed. I was told I was wrong. I didn't understand how literature worked. I was doing it wrong.
That experience established a framework for the next many years of my life. I learned in that moment that as far as "achievement" was concerned, the trick was simply to decode what was expected and feed it to the people judging you and ratifying your performance and participation in the exercise. It became quite adept at that game.
Through it all, though, the books that I loved to read were science fiction. A trashy genre more or less looked down upon by every teacher I had who purported to teach me "how" to love books. But I ignored them. I was captivated by the simplistic action fables of Ben Bova, the socio-political writings of Robert Heinlein (I didn't realize as a kid what a whacked out right winger he was), Asimov's books and, as I grew older, P.K. Dick.
I don't think I ever embraced SciFi as escapism, it seemed to me like speculation on our current situation. Extraploations of the future based on where we were now and where things were headed.
In my twenties I stumbled into Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, and Haruki Murakami.
Murakami is mostly not thought of as a science fiction author and he probably best expresses the gorgeous hinge that literature as become for me. He writes in a way and about things that throw into sharp relief my current existence but provides a prism of culture and thinking that makes me step back and think. That's what I associate with "SciFi" but some might just think that's called "good literature." I don't really care. His book Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of Desire is one of the best things I've ever read.
In a similar vein, David Mitchell wrote a book--Cloud Atlas--that I still boggle over. As I've written before, it's a book of such power and sweep and perspective that if I had written it I think I'd just curl up in a ball and hope I died soon, so I wouldn't have to spend the rest of my life trying to equal that novel.
Throughout this literary expedition, I've been consistently drawn to Bill Gibson's work. That's neither surprising nor shocking as he's recognized as the man who coined "cyberspace" and invented the genre of "cyberpunk." He's probably everyone's favorite SciFi author.
But lately, he's been doing something gorgeous that has made so much sense to me. He's been writing about the present, and the near past. And in his hands this contemporary world is as strange, disorienting, and fucked up as the imaginary space opera worlds of the future that most "SciFi" authors traffic in.
And what her writes about--what he's always written about--seems so very close to the texture of my existence that I can't help but be captivated.
This entire arch--my love of science fiction, my engagement with stuff that's almost here, the frustration that most people can't see it happening--it all comes together in comments Gibson made in response to a question in a recent interview:
You made your name as a science-fiction writer, but in your last
two novels you've moved squarely into the present. Have you lost
interest in the future?
It has to do with the nature of the present. If one had gone to talk to
a publisher in 1977 with a scenario for a science-fiction novel that
was in effect the scenario for the year 2007, nobody would buy anything
like it. It's too complex, with too many huge sci-fi tropes: global
warming; the lethal, sexually transmitted immune-system disease; the
United States, attacked by crazy terrorists, invading the wrong
country. Any one of these would have been more than adequate for a
science-fiction novel. But if you suggested doing them all and
presenting that as an imaginary future, they'd not only show you the
door, they'd probably call security.
Funny how spending my life thinking about fantastical futures makes me feel so grounded.