I have never been a big fan of Science Fiction books or movies. I like Star Wars and Star Trek, but I really don’t consider them real Science Fiction, as they just seem to be Westerns that happen hundreds of years from now.
As I was contemplating the recent 550 mile drive from Dickinson to Luverne, I thought about one of the few Science Fiction books I love from my preteen years, A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L’Engle, in which she describes people traveling through space using a tesseract, which is instantaneous travel by making folds in space and time. It would have been been so great to just roll up the Great Plains and get to Luverne instantaneously instead of driving eight hours! I suppose would have gladly accepted an offer from Scotty to “beam me down” to Luverne as well.
What are your most favorite and least favorite Science Fiction stories and movies? Where would you like to be teletransported?
Trail Baboon 
Aren’t westerns just stories of chivalry, enclaves under siege, wandering strangers and knights errant, just overlaid in the nineteenth century American West? The stories don’t change, just the particulars.
When I was adolescent and a teenager I read a lot of science fiction- so much that I couldn’t begin to recall all the authors and stories. I read a lot of Ray Bradbury, books like The Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked This Way Comes, but Bradbury tends to be light on science and more concerned with human interaction. I remember being deeply impressed by Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and Ursula LeGuin’s Lathe of Heaven. I remember being gripped by Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle and laughing out loud at his Siren’s of Titan. The distinction between science fiction and fantasy is permeable and some of the books I choose fall rather in the latter category.
Tales of aliens and space travel (instantaneous or otherwise) generally interest me less than stories of time travel. Jack Finney’s Time and Again and From Time to Time satisfy both my attraction to traveling in time and my interest in New York City. I read H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine and saw the Rod Taylor (?) movie of it when I was very young but the idea of time travel attracted me more than Wells’ treatment of it. I suppose my interest in and collection of nineteenth century material constitutes a kind of personal time travel.
Among the time travel/science fiction books I’ve enjoyed this year have been The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley and The Jane Austen Project by Kathleen Flynn.
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Rise and Shine, Baboons,
Renee, what I really want to know is, how are you doing? You must be exhilarated and exhausted to finally be there after getting your plan to retire and move underway.
SciFi–I just do not like most SciFi. So much of it, as well as fantasy, is so poorly written that I cannot invest myself in it. And, Renee, I agree with your assessment of Star Trek and Star Wars. They are cowboy stories of Good vs Evil. Star Wars even has the black helmets and uniforms vs white ones.
Our selections for Blevins Book Club in November are not helping my attitude. I gave up on Frankenstein 70% of the way in because I could not make myself care about this story. And that is my usual response to SciFi. Sorry fellow readers.
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Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier is the worst of the entire franchise.
Issac Azimov’s Foundation Trilogy is great.
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Maybe I should finally read the Azimov…
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bill mentioned vonnegut. he is one of my favorites and in my years of reading his stuff and his comments in his entry to the wtiters sorld back in the days of short stories published in magazines with fun covers depicting scantily dressed women and space creatures. they didnt know shat else to classify him as snd since he wrote about water crystals turning solid and the world having to desl either no water they called it sci fi. so i like science fiction. i have read heinlien and assamov and bradberry but have the blessing / cirse if not remembering a thing about it. i think the sci fi writers of 60’s and pre 60’s sci fi had a different world to look at and present to. i was laughing at this weeks turner classic movie offerings. monter week in honor of halloween. i seldom see movies with a 0% rating on rottn tomatos but they have a bunch of them about kilker sliens and giant spiders.
transport me?…i kind of like the travel . time to chill and reflect, id like to go tovnepal and south africa and new zealand but i think zapping me there would take the fun out of it. i think the travels on my various journeys have made it interesting. hurricanes in china. to mountain trails in the backroads on canadian rocky roadsr
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I’m not a fan of sci-fi either. I loved Wrinkle in Time when I was young because it seemed magical. Much of sci-fi seems far-fetched to me, and it just doesn’t grab me like literature does.
I listened to Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea books a year ago. It just didn’t appeal to me at all.
I agree with Bill’s analysis of westerns. It’s always the same story with characters wearing different hats.
I have not given up on either book for BBC. (I don’t usually give up on a book I’m reading, even if I hate it.) I have finished the Scalzi book, and I’m about 30 pages from the end of Frankenstein. I want things to turn out for Victor, but I don’t think they will.
I’d like to be teleported to a time when people are kind and living in peace. When they are proud to be American. When there isn’t a madman demolishing the White House for his own vanity project, while ignoring the Constitution, murdering people in boats, removing our rights, lying, and trying to take revenge on people he dislikes.
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Hear, hear!
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I am nearly illiterate about Sci Fi. I was engrossed with Stranger in a Strange Land in the early 70s, and more recently read Kindred by Octavia Butler – would read something else by her…
I think I would like to be transported back in time to when we lived in villages, not huge cities. I realize this is flawed thinking, and I’m sure there were plenty of awful things happening back then too. But what we’re doing now doesn’t seem to be working.
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I am not a huge sci-fi person, but my favorite science-fiction story is Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. It’s hard to name my least favorite, because I will just not finish the book or movie if I don’t like it. So, it’s not fair to review it.
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Welcome to the Trail…
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I should add that I really enjoyed Star Trek’s Deep Space Nine when it came out (80s?) – there was some underlying message in each episode. Curious – has anyone hear read any Gene Roddenbury in book form?
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CORRECTION – It was The Next Generation that I liked so much – Jean-Luc Picard, et al. (In my mind, Deep Space 9 was just OK.)
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You make an excellent point about genre: Star Trek is a western, retooled for a futuristic setting, and Star Wars is Arthurian legend, reimagined for the same. And the same could probably be said of my old favorite sci-fi novel, “Crystal Singer,” by Anne McCaffrey. It’s been a lot of years since I read it, but I’m pretty sure it’s a frontier story, complete with claim-jumping miners. In the future, of course, in space.
Truthfully, though, I’m more of a fantasy reader than sci-fi; Anne McCaffrey’s Pern novels (dragons!) are more my speed.
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I haven’t read any Anne McCaffery…but maybe I’ll start with Crystal Singer.
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She’s been one of my favorites since gradeschool. 🙂
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