Recommended Reading.

Last night, the Evil Dr. Smith and I went out for dinner with my friend Alan and his new female companion Karli.  Alan is in the process of moving to Vancouver from Toronto, and has shown the foresight to line up an apartment and a girlfriend in a single visit.

Given that Alan is not a great fan of literature himself, I was pleased to discover that Karli is a reader. (She's also extremely good looking and apparently quite smart - I hope Alan's apartment is as nice.) As part of our conversation, we were discussing the trials and tribulations of long-distance moving, and I mentioned that my move to the West Coast was a little more expensive than Laurie's due to factors like my extensive library. When pressed, I confessed to my long term addiction to science fiction and fantasy.

As sometimes happens when people find out that I'm a geek, I was asked what science fiction novel I’d recommend - Karli had already explained that her literary interests are not tagged to a particular genre. 

I initially went with Dune, by Frank Herbert, which is a superb novel in spite of unfortunate adaptations to both movie and miniseries, but settled on Larry Niven’s Ringworld instead.

We finished dinner, we paid the bill, we shook hands and hugged and so forth, and went on our separate ways.  When I finally got home, I made a cup of tea, came into my study, sat down, stared at my books, and brooded for a while. 

Ringworld is not a bad recommendation when put on the spot over dinner. It deals with aliens, space travel, extended life, teleportation booths, and a plethora of other familiar SF tropes.  The massive scale of the Ringworld itself illustrates the sense of wonder and imagination which typifies the best of hard SF, and the adventures that Louis Wu and his motley crew experience there are thought-provoking, exciting, and entertaining.  It’s a clever book, and I think it’s easily accessible for non-fans.

All that being said, I feel that I’ve slighted any number of equally valid candidates for recommended reading: Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, or perhaps The Lathe of Heaven; The Lord of Light, by Roger Zelazny*, (maybe The Dream Master); Downbelow Station, by C. J. Cherryh; Babel-17, or Nova, by Samuel R. Delany, Lord Valentine’s Castle, by Robert Silverberg; Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress; The Centauri Device, by M. John Harrison; Altered Carbon, by Richard Morgan, Hyperion, by Dan Simmons; Neuromancer, by William Gibson - and I'll stop there with ten authors.

Other science fiction fans (including my sister) will read this list and immediately voice their objections.

"What about Stranger in a Strange Land?"

"There’s no Clarke!"

"There’s no Asimov!"

"Where's Douglas Adams!  Or Piers Anthony!"

"Peter Hamilton's really good!"

"What about Lovecraft?"

"How could you skip Harlan Ellison?"

And they would be completely correct - the books listed above are in no way intended to explore the complete range of science fiction, and I could double those names in two minutes.

Then what does that list represent? 

The authors I’ve listed above are the ones that captured me with their imagination, style and skill, in books that I've returned to again and again over the years.  It's a bit sloped toward the 80s, when I was really hitting my stride as a fan, but includes older and new fiction as well.  Some of them are not as high profile - I suspect that M. John Harrison is a new name to some fans reading this - and the books I've listed aren't always the best known for those authors.  But they are all exceptional examples of writing talent, regardless of their genre, and I would unhesitatingly recommend all of them in a heartbeat.

And, in conclusion, I have to apologize.  I've always said that I didn't want to do lists here, everyone does lists, and now I've done one.  In my defense, I held out for almost eight years, so I don't feel I've betrayed my principles by too much.

- Sid

* Both these authors are equally at home with fantasy or science fiction, but Karli’s original question was for a science fiction recommendation, so I’m restricting myself to SF.  Although, really, with Roger Zelazny it's sometimes hard to tell.

Is there another answer?

I'm obsessed by time. If I had a time machine I'd visit Marilyn Monroe in her prime or drop in on Galileo as he turned his telescope to the heavens. Perhaps I'd even travel to the end of the universe to find out how our whole cosmic story ends.

- Stephen Hawking, How to Build A Time Machine

I've previously mentioned that my employers have a long and unfortunate history of choosing admin staff with little or no knowledge of Star Trek.  We've recently hired a new employee to fill one of the positions in question - I offered to prepare some basic Star Trek questions for the interview process, simple things like: "What is the name of Data's brother?", but I was quietly reassured that the HR people could take care of that sort of thing themselves.

So far, I haven't really had a chance to test the hiring team's due diligence in this critical area, although I've been reassured that I shouldn't worry. However, a recent encounter with Diana, our new co-worker, has made me a bit concerned about how things will work out in the long run.

Coming back from lunch with my fellow employee Wendy* last week, we bumped into the new hire wandering down the street with what appeared to be a bagged lunch clutched in one hand.  Wendy politely recommended a nearby park with a nice view of the mountains and dock gantry cranes and so on as a pleasant spot to eat.  I added that I had found a time machine there a few months ago as well, which I felt added a certain je ne sais quoi to the park's credentials.

Diana considered this for a moment, and then asked, "What year does it go to?"

Mildly affronted, I replied, "What year does it go to?  All of them! How do you think this works?  'Excuse me, does this time machine go to the Battle of Hastings?'  "Sorry, no, miss, this is the Number 12 Time Machine, I only go to the French Revolution.  You want the Number 8 Time Machine at the stop across the street.' "

At this point Wendy intervened and explained that further explanation of my mania could be found on my ongoing eight-year old science fiction blog**, which concluded with Diana pointing at me and happily exclaiming, "AH, YOU'RE A GREAT BIG NERD!!!!!"

Well, yes...was there a question in there?

But, honestly...what year does my time machine go to?  It's time PORTALS that only go to one date, what do they teach people in school these days?

Seriously though, from Wells' eponymous Time Machine through almost 120 years of time chairs, time ships, time projectors, time highways, time tunnels, police boxes, DeLoreans and phone booths, I am at a loss to think of a single example of a mechanical time travel device which is dedicated to a single temporal destination.  I open this up to my readership - any examples of single-stop time mechanisms come to mind?

- Sid  

* There is some mild irony here in that Wendy, to whom I offered the Star Trek interview questions, is one of the people who experienced Jean-Luc Picard fail at the reception window. She has since been promoted, which would seem to indicate that the company doesn't place the same focus on this that I do.

**The blog thing really does take all of the guesswork out of it for people, perhaps I should have t-shirts made or get cards printed or something.

All the ladies in the house say, “Awwwww….”

Spider-Man in particular, he loves Spider-Man.

Terry, talking about his son Edward

And now, here's Ed with his favourite umbrella.  Ed is apparently also fond of Los Angeles, but that's less relevant for this blog.

 - Sid