Damek.

As I sit at home with my damaged knee up on a pillow, sipping a little rum, eating some chili, waiting for the time to leave for a couple hours evening after-work work, listening to a child’s playful yells outside that unfortunately sound eerily like a cat in heat (or is it the other way around? I think it is!), I feel compelled to express my love for science fiction.

This is best done with a bit of quoted text from the afterword of the book I just finished, The Perseids and Other Stories by Robert Charles Wilson, which contains a story about a woman who’s spent her whole life pursuing “the strange,” which for her began in the 1960s with drugs, the occult, etc., and ends with … well, I don’t want to give the story away, but the strangeness finds her and she embraces it, of course! The afterword quote:

Deirdre’s love of the strange represents, I think, a real and legitimate esthetic impulse, though one not held in much esteem. Science fiction and fantasy cater to that urge the way “literary” fiction caters to the human need for intelligent gossip. [Ha!!] The nineteenth century gave the impulse its due (that Pleasure Dome, that Raven), but the twentieth dropped it like a hot Freudian potato.

So the Strange put on its Appollonian suit and tie and went to live in the low-rent neighborhood of Astounding Stories and Thrilling Wonder.

You hear talk now and again of the death of science fiction, but I suspect the twenty-first century will be good for us — that the Strange will come leaping out of the closet with its ray gun in one hand and its bottle of laudanum in the other, delirious with possibility.

Amen; one can only hope. I find that’s my deal, in a halfway sort of way. I love the strange and have sought it quite a lot, but I’ve also bought society’s lack of esteem for it and always felt sort of shy about it, and pursued it with dainty care for my safety.

Well, enough of that.

And it’s funny, I don’t like traditional fantasy, but give me something incredibly inventive and strange like China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station and I’ll lap it up. As for “intelligent gossip,” it’s true, it’s not usually my thing, but I love strange books that pull it off well and I think Wilson’s stories and books carry it with gusto.

Other authors I like include primarly English and Scottish men, for some reason, and this seems a good place to link to the recent incredibly fun posts by Ken MacLeod and Charles Stross where they share quotes from “one-star reviews” of their books on Amazon. Hilarious! One review quote from a Stross book: “Stross managed to thoroughly alienate me with the unpleasant characters, violence, and sick sex. I wanted to wash out my mouth and take a shower after one particularly graphic description.” God, I wish I remembered it well enough to know what that person was talking about!

But one foreign reader commented that though he loved his books he understood some of the reviews; “…your style of writing, an occasional reader can find difficult to get hooked at first by one of your writings because you tend to start with a very complicated situation, with few information to the reader, in order to reveal this information through the book. I love this style of writing and it hooks me but, to be honest, I must agree that this can not be the best way to recruit new, not hard sci-fi, readers.” It’s true. I love that sort of writing gimmick (and honestly, yeah, it’s a gimmick of sorts at this point), but it can be frustrating to others. It’s certainly not exclusive to science fiction, though.

Speaking of characters in science fiction, I am currently watching the last episode of the original Star Trek, “Turnabout Intruder,” in which an old love interest of Captain Kirk’s takes over his body and puts her in his. There’s a scene where love-in-Kirk’s body is arguing with Dr. McCoy and Dr. Coleman (who knows what’s up) and the dialog is heavy with double-meanings and games. I love that stuff.

On that note, I’m not ashamed to say I’m heavily obsessed with Doctor Who lately which is currently perhaps the height of science fiction half-fantasy fluffery. That’s OK, though, nothing wrong with a bit of adventurous escapism…