This Is Your Brain on Science Fiction

Between the ages of say twelve and twenty-one, I read a lot - probably the most I ever read in my life. Some was for school, but textbooks aside, I even enjoyed a good percentage of the stuff I "had" to read, and I went beyond what was required in many cases, especially in the realms of philosophy and literature.

Of course, much of this extra effort was motivated not by intellectual curiosity but vanity - I enjoyed showing off: "look at the twelve-year-old checking Herman Kahn's 'On Thermonuclear Warfare' out of the library!" (and no, I didn't finish it. I skimmed the first five chapters, tops).

But I'll tell you what genre I immersed myself in the most, during that time: science fiction. Novels, short stories, sci-fi magazines - the whole lot. Heinlein, Sturgeon, Asimov, Zelazny, Simak, Bradbury, Blish, Clarke, del Ray, Boucher, Miller, Harrison, Delany, Pohl, and on and and on.

I finally reached a saturation point, or maybe my standards for dialogue and character development (never the strongest aspects of the genre) just got too high. But by then the damage had been done. And of course there were still the movies: Star Wars, Blade Runner, Alien, Close Encounters, Terminator, RoboCop. And let's not forget Star Trek.

What did all this do to me? Beyond the common symptoms - persistent disappointment in the failure of technology to bring us flying cars, robot servants, or faster-than-light spacecraft - here are my thoughts and concerns:

• Why are there still nations? We are never going to be admitted into the United Federation of Planets at this rate.
• Time is an illusion, or at least much more fluid and malleable than we think it is at this point.
• Evolution is not only real, it is probably accelerating. And it's not limited to humans. Or even higher mammals.
• Off-world colonies. Hello? Yes, I know they'll be run by mega-corporations and populated by coerced labor, at least initially. But we have to start somewhere.

Feel free to add your own entries.....