I love old sci-fi. I mean, I was raised on it… Dune, Foundation, Starship Troopers, Red Shirts… I can’t claim that I’ve read a tonne of classic sci-fi, but I’ve read my fair share. The first sci-fi I ever read was a Ben Bova collection called “Future Crime,” and the hooks have been sunk deep into me ever since. It’s my comfort reading… I love fantasy, romance, modern alternate history, basically speculative fiction of any colour and stripe, but sci-fi is what I always go back to.
Along that track, I’ve been reading a lot of older Battletech novels, since my new podcast is all about Battletech stories that I’ve written and performed. And there is a certain… je ne sais quoi about old sci-fi that, as much as I love it, tends to permeate works of the 70s and 80s. They can be quite casually sexist, for one thing (although I doubt it was intentional, just below the threshold of the time for what constituted inappropriate male gaze) and often casually racist in the same vein (skin colours of characters are either “dark chocolate” or “normal,” that kinda thing), but there’s more to it than that.
Things like… the scope of what the future would hold is often missed. Look at the exceptional “Neuromancer,” in which William Gibson does his damnedest to dream up the most bleak, terrifying, oppressive future imaginable… and it’s still less depressing than modern life in many, many ways. Society’s casual disregard for personal privacy, our acceptance of police and government surveillance, our surrender to the megacorps and monopolies in almost all regards… Gibson thought people would fight for these rights, but instead we have lineups around the block for the newest pocket panopticon from Zeibatsu 071.
Anyway, it’s just something you notice when you read old sci-fi. People using terms like “Megabytes” or “gigabits” with reverence, unaware that we’d explode past such paltry data usage within years of them writing how insurmountable a threshold such numbers seemed.
With all that stated, I have an old book I want to start and finish today, if at all possible, so I’d better get back at it!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!