I've been an SF fan for as long as I can remember. I'll ammend that to SF&F, as it is frequently the designation and I am a big fan of Fantasy as well as the Science-based stuff. So I am a fan, and a fairly rabid one, too. Nevertheless, I don't expect everyone to appreciate the genre, and I certainly don't push it on any friends who don't have a desire to read it. I consider taste in literature to be a fairly personal thing and open to many paths, all of them valid and worthy.
But I can't help but pick up on the rep that SF has. Some think of it as universally (no pun intended) campy, simplistic, or pulpy. Some are dismissive; it's not true literature. Not worthy of inclusion in the grand club of intellectual writing. Some probably find it pointless. Some probably find it not representative of real life, with no meaning for the current-day reader.
To those people I say... that's probably all true of SOME science fiction. But it's also all true of many books available in the bookstore today. There are some fine, fine examples of writing in the science fiction genre; books that illustrate great ideas, books that present very human characters in all their beauty and complexity.
One of the things that draws me to SF&F, especially to the fantasy side of the equation, is the deep and resonant response I have to myth and archetype. I find SF exciting - so many ideas can be explored through this genre; concepts about what might be, what developments might happen and how they will work. And most importantly, how people will respond to them.
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