Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
I feel the same, though I suspect my father had more to do with it. Dad defined himself as an agnostic, but was careful to distinguish that from atheism. He didn't believe in God, but he also didn't believe there was no God. He had no evidence he could accept as valid one way of the other, and chose not to commit to one belief or the other. (He also read SF when he was younger, and there were old SF books lying around the house. I think the first SF I ever read was a copy of the classic Healy and McComas _Adventures in Time and Space_ anthology, which was the second SF collection to be issued as a hardcover book. I was young enough to not understand eveything I read in it, but the Sense of Wonder came through very clearly.)
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The only science fiction I think my parents had was
1984. But my mother was a reader, so there were certainly plenty of books around. (My father didn't read much-- a fact I never noticed as a kid! But he was an engineer and taught me all sorts of useful stuff about science, as well as making sure I saw the classic SF films.) I found SF by being intrigued by two Heinlein books at a school book fair (
Between Planets and
Space Cadet, I think.) Prior to that I'd read Ben Bova's
End of Exile, borrowed from a library while visiting a relative in a different state, but I don't think I really knew that there was a whole category of SF at that point. But the two Heinlein books really gave me a shove in the SF direction. I attribute my decision to major in physics in college largely to reading Heinlein. (And I blame Tolkein for my decision to switch to linguistics mid-stream.
)
Looking back, I think Heinlein ended up providing the basis for some of those unspoken assumptions we've been talking about, but I have to say I've been deconstructing and in some cases discarding some of those over the years, too. I think that would please him.
