Actually I've posted very little on ST this time around, compared to some. I think the OS appeal for me was due in large part to the times, as well as my impressionable youth. I was much more receptive back then. While I once was a voracious reader and viewer of Sci-Fi in my youth and into my '20's, I am no longer a fan as an adult and don't touch the stuff with any regularity or enthusiasm. Watched about half the NG episodes, a third of DS9, a handful of Voyager, and absolutely NONE of Enterprise. My interest had completely died by then. Did the genre deteriorate? Hard to say. Did my tastes change? Obviously, but why? I am no longer as able to suspend disbelief and buy into the story lines, premises, often shaky science and speculative technology. May as well be about Smurfs- it's the same thing to me anymore. And I've had my fill of morality plays, too. You can only re-tell a parable so many times. Perhaps it was because of too many broken promises about the future. Mankind's wasted, unfulfilled potential as we expend our energies in continued self-destruction. Sci-Fi was also called "speculative fiction", but that description no longer applies at all. Clarke, Asimov, Van Vogt, Anderson, Heinlein, Weinbaum, Lesser, Del Rey, among a host of others- the writers of the Golden Age and Silver Age- wrote of a hopeful future, and one not too far off. Precious little of it has come to pass, the timeline has been, at best, stretched to far beyond my own lifetime. It just doesn't seem to be within the realm of possibility anymore. Modern writers are just too far removed from anything I'd ever experience to capture my attention. Or at least anything that I can now convince myself of perhaps experiencing. Too, there is the possibility that I'm just not sophisticated enough to appreciate it. In this case it could be "pearls before swine". Maybe I'm a hillbilly trying to relate to the stories in the New Yorker. This certainly would have surprised the young Chuck, but I now read non-fiction almost exclusively. My primary interest concerns real people, doing extraordinary things during a time and circumstance that will never be repeated in the course of human history. It has absolutely nothing to do with spaceflight, astronomy, cosmology, or SETI. I can feel a personal connection that is impossible with most Science writing or Sci-Fi. Real adventures, experienced by real people- common in one sense but extraordinary by virtue of circumstance- and there, but by the grace of God, go I. It could have been me. That starship trooper could not possibly have been me. OK, I'm done. Now off to my appointment with Cecil Lewis. --- Canopus56 <canopus56@yahoo.com> wrote:
--- Chuck Hards <chuckhards@yahoo.com> wrote: <snip all>
I don't know how this got this far OT, but here's my list of favorite NG episodes.
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