I think it's odd when you find yourself, back against wall and nowhere to go, having to depend upon one thing and one thing alone to get you through the day. It's odd because you look back and marvel at the sheer number of things that could get you worked up and excited once upon a time, but now linger on as mere traces instead. If you do revisit those things, it's more out of inertia than anything: because you do not know any better.
For me, this one thing I find myself keeping on revisiting is science fiction. It's an interesting development, since I've always been in love with fiction that gave itself up to the very human drive of imagining, or finding joy in linking disparate elements together and coming up with a story. All fiction does it, to some extent. This is why I read: to find this drive thrumming in the words making up a paragraph, giving it direction, shaping it into something that understands that the only way to get at truth is to indulge in a game, a game involving, among other things, recreating the world around you, it's patterns into something you can perhaps put a finger on.
Then why science fiction?
You read too much of this stuff, and you are more than liable to get tired of the various permutation combinations authors have indulged in. At times, they'll all seem like they're trying to outdo one another when it comes to ideas. But ideas are only as effective as their treatment. When you're small, the treatment recedes into the background and the idea seems to pop out. Then, with time, the ideas reveal themselves to be merely an excuse for you to carry on reading, and suddenly that doesn't quite cut it anymore. What then?
Then you chance upon an author like Theodore Sturgeon, or James Tiptree Jr. You might not know who these people are. But it's very evident from their writing that they weren't simply happy with ideas in themselves. Something else was forcing itself out through the words, something distinct and at once terrifying in it's loneliness, in it's capacity to lay itself bare. That they found science fiction a good platform is not merely happen chance.I know, because I'm going through something similar. It's the same impulse that drives me, time and time again, to sit with a new story everyday, bad or good.
A different way of looking at things. Not mere wish-fulfillment.
But I ask myself: isn't that a kind of escape too?
For me, this one thing I find myself keeping on revisiting is science fiction. It's an interesting development, since I've always been in love with fiction that gave itself up to the very human drive of imagining, or finding joy in linking disparate elements together and coming up with a story. All fiction does it, to some extent. This is why I read: to find this drive thrumming in the words making up a paragraph, giving it direction, shaping it into something that understands that the only way to get at truth is to indulge in a game, a game involving, among other things, recreating the world around you, it's patterns into something you can perhaps put a finger on.
Then why science fiction?
You read too much of this stuff, and you are more than liable to get tired of the various permutation combinations authors have indulged in. At times, they'll all seem like they're trying to outdo one another when it comes to ideas. But ideas are only as effective as their treatment. When you're small, the treatment recedes into the background and the idea seems to pop out. Then, with time, the ideas reveal themselves to be merely an excuse for you to carry on reading, and suddenly that doesn't quite cut it anymore. What then?
Then you chance upon an author like Theodore Sturgeon, or James Tiptree Jr. You might not know who these people are. But it's very evident from their writing that they weren't simply happy with ideas in themselves. Something else was forcing itself out through the words, something distinct and at once terrifying in it's loneliness, in it's capacity to lay itself bare. That they found science fiction a good platform is not merely happen chance.I know, because I'm going through something similar. It's the same impulse that drives me, time and time again, to sit with a new story everyday, bad or good.
A different way of looking at things. Not mere wish-fulfillment.
But I ask myself: isn't that a kind of escape too?
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