[Maerad(",)]

Share to us and why. :)
And also, tell us what was/were the book/books (that is a SF) that helped you open the world of sciece fiction? :) tell us and why?:D

Well, I do not like SF books much, that's why I want to know SF people's reasons why they like SF books. :D

[Chuffalump]

I think that if you read a selection of threads from this first page of the forum, you'll get a good impression of why SF readers read SF.

[Ropie]

Well, I do not like SF books much, that's why I want to know SF people's reasons why they like SF books. :D

I imagine I like it for similar reasons as to why you like Fantasy (which I don't like ;))

[jbooks]

I like SF because it lets my imagination run wild. http://cph19.info/book/sffw/smile.gif
The book that got me started on this SF craze was enders game. That has to be one of my all time favorite books!

[JimF]

I like the sense of adventure and discovering the unknown. I was interested in SF from a very young age. I remember watching startrek with my father wen I about 3 or 4. I was facinated with space and astronomy in grade school. When I was 9 the first novel (book without pictures) I read was the runaway robot by Lester Del Rey. (apearently it was ghost written and LDR got the credit.)

I was 11 when I saw Star Wars in 1977 and was facinated. Later that year I heard of a bookstore downtown that sold only Sicence Fiction and Fanatsy. I took the bus downtown, without my parents permission. I must have read the back of every book on the shelves before dropping my allowence on Ringworld. I was blown away by the concept and wanted to know more. I have been hooked on SF ever since.

So for me the idea of explorartion into the unknown is key. most recently I was given that same feeling when I read the back of Hamilton's Pandora's Star. I have been hooked on Hamilton ever since.

Jim

[Hobbit]

It's a good question, Maerad. As has been said before, a look through some of those threads will give you some idea.

As for me, as I said here (http://ubiquitous-absence.blogspot.com/2009/11/s-n-spotlight-into-wild-blue-yon-der.html), I pretty much started with SF. Like many, such as Jim above, I liked the idea of 'what if' - what will happen if the population rises? if we run out of food? space? if we're invaded by Martians? If we travel to other planets? What will they be like?

The future was, in different turns, interesting, exciting, funny, and scary. It made me think about the past and what could happen in the future.

It took me to exciting places - where seas boiled, where air froze, where gravity was enough to make things two-dimensional, where explorers discovered things that were new and showed us how they coped with it. Almost anything was possible, and I found that exciting.

Mark

[psikeyhackr]

Share to us and why. :)
And also, tell us what was/were the book/books (that is a SF) that helped you open the world of sciece fiction? :) tell us and why?:D

Well, I do not like SF books much, that's why I want to know SF people's reasons why they like SF books. :D

Well to begin with there is HUGE variation in the stuff that I regard as SCIENCE FICTION not to mention the stuff that I don't regard as such but other people do.

I would prefer to call it a Sense of FASCINATION then Sense of WONDER.

Here is a classic example of the difference:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/73467/stargate-sg-1-a-hundred-days

For anyone that can't view that:

SG-1 is on a planet that experiences annual meteor showers that they call FIRE RAIN. Carter starts to explain how that can only happen if they pass through an asteroid belt at the same time every year.

Then Colonel O'Neal says:

"Please! Don't suck the fun out of this."

Carter says, "Sorry Sir."

The first 2 min. 40 sec. of that episode explain the whole thing.

For me learning how things really work doesn't "suck the fun out", it just adds another level of FUN. For me this is largely why SCIENCE Fiction is way more fun than Fantasy. Reading sci-fi in grade school had me researching the evolution of stars. Sci-fi is why I learned that the Sun was a star and that stars are suns very far away. And what a light-year was, and nuclear fusion, etc., etc.

The nuns had science books and NEVER USED THEM. Totally PISSED ME OFF! So most of what I learned about science occurred almost exclusively as a result of my reading science fiction.

But there are lots of variations in SF even from the same author. Tao Zero is very different from Brain Wave though they were both written by Poul Anderson. Tao Zero explicates the effect of time dilation of near light speed travel better than any other SF story that I know. Brain Wave doesn't so much demonstrate any physical principle as show how the way reality works depends on certain physical constants. Change those constants and reality will work differently. Brain Wave might be compared to David Brin's The Practice Effect. How the world works depends on how physics works, they are inseparable.

I am not going to learn any simple physics from reading SF anymore but I guess the habit is already formed. Good books are better than television.

I read 3 Star Trek novels in the last year and tried a forth but gave up mostly out of boredom. It wasn't bad just not interesting enough to read. It was no better than a Harry Potter book and I wasn't reading it for literary education purposes. Star Trek is good enough to watch but not good enough to read. That dramatic trick they often pull with people passing out after 10 minutes because life support is down pisses me off. There should be enough air to last hours or days without life support. How can the ship lose heat fast? It is surrounded by vacuum. Why do they use a vacuum for insolation in a thermos bottle? Trek let's too much pseudo-science leak in. But it is TELEVISION!

But even sci-fi without a heavy science element can be intellectually interesting and have relevant foresight. Alexi Panshin's Rite of Passage got a Nebula Award in 1968 and nominated for a Hugo in 1969. The world population was less than 4 billion but the story is post-apocalyptic and Earth was destroyed in 2041 because of wars due to population pressure. We are approaching 7 billion and although OPEC was formed in 1960 almost no one heard of it until 1973. But now we have Peak Oil and Global Warming to complicate things by 2041.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rite_of_Passage

So sci-fi can be an entertaining way to provoke ideas about the future. But our children will have to live in it because not enough people read good sci-fi for the last 40 years.

NASA just bombed the Moon in October looking for water.

NASA today opened a new chapter in our understanding of the moon. Preliminary data from the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, indicates that the mission successfully uncovered water during the Oct. 9, 2009 impacts into the permanently shadowed region of Cabeus cater near the moon’s south pole.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LCROSS/main/prelim_water_results.html

The sci-fi version is from FIFTY YEARS AGO.

ALL DAY SEPTEMBER (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/24161/24161-h/24161-h.htm)

This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction June 1959.

Published 10 years and one month before the Moon landing.

Published 50 years and the title one month before water found on the Moon.

The story is about finding water on the Moon.

As a famous SF character says, "Fascinating!"

Fantasy is without Fascination.

psik

[Maerad(",)]

Thank you for the replies. I confess, it all made me somewhat persuaded to read SF books. :D especially about the water in the moon.:p

[krm0915]

It's difficult to pinpoint specific reasons as to why I enjoy science fiction. I suppose that, similar to what JimF wrote, that sense of exploring the unknown, delving into new worlds and possibilities, has always been a fun and interesting aspect for me. This interest is also what eventually led me to enjoy some fantasy novels, as well, though for a long time I almost exclusively read sci-fi.

The first science fiction books I read were Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke and Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. Even to this day, with all the sci-fi I've read, those two books are some of my favorites, and hold somewhat of a special place in my heart and imagination.

[E_Moon]

As a young person, I liked science fiction for two reasons: some of it was fiction about science--and I was a science enthusiast from a very young age, and much of it was "frontier" fiction, depicting worlds beyond the one we live in. I was also hooked on space very early, from reading about the early high-altitude flights in National Geographic. Other ideas also intrigued me. DUNE, for instance, really crystallized a nascent interest in ecology--living in a semi-arid environment, I easily made the transition to the desert planet and the desire to terraform it (on the one hand) and preserve desert (on the other.)

Science fiction is not just one kind of story (any more than fantasy or any other genre is just one type of story.) People of many different backgrounds write it--and write it for many different reasons. That's something I find appealing, though of course I don't like everything I start.