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From: ops@ncsc
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: a comment on the sf as literature discussion
Message-ID: <2620@topaz.ARPA>
Date: Tue, 9-Jul-85 09:31:19 EDT
Article-I.D.: topaz.2620
Posted: Tue Jul  9 09:31:19 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 11-Jul-85 08:01:05 EDT
Sender: daemon@topaz.ARPA
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Lines: 39

From: ------ Operator 


Listening to you all arguing among yourselves over what is good
literature, or how much more realistic the explosions in one movie
are over the explosions in another, or which author is more godlike
than another, or whether fantasy is as valid as hard science fiction,
or any of the other subjects you bicker over had me wondering if any
of you remember the wonder and the awe of realizing that the things
you read about in your treehouses and under your covers by flashlight
could actually be true and that one day you could have a part in
making them be true. I wonder how many of you were as influenced in
your lives by science fiction as I have been in mine.

Podkayne of Mars told me that girls can have adventures too.  Andre
Norton's books said it was okay to be different, that my strength
lay within me, in my differences.  I, Robot fired my imagination
so that I ended up in my present career because of the dream of
development of robotics in my lifetime, like Susan.  Silent Running
made me aware of the importance of conservation. Le Guinn inspired
me to study Zen and to realize that western thought need not be the
world view. Dhalgren's bleak ubanity frightened me into an awareness
of modern dispair. Tolkien taught me about personal sacrifice and
of the price of honor.  Starship Troopers told me of the futility
of war.  All of the books I have read, no matter how good or bad, 
have given me something beyond what I had before I read them.  That
is all I ask from literature.

When I was a child, science fiction in all its forms, with all
its faults took me on wondrous journeys inside myself and outside
of time and space.  It does the same for me today, for all its faults
and crass commercialism.  Science fiction, fiction of any sort,
is the dream inside the soul, reaching out to share a vision of
life as it is, as it may be, as it could be.
 
Jessie @ NCSC


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