Saturday, September 05, 2009

...like a Stranger in a Strange Strange Land

A couple of weeks ago, I had a conversation with a friend of mine about how many movies I'd seen versus how many books I'd read. The final verdict was that I have seen more movies than is probably healthy, but that I'm rather ignorant when it comes to all the books out there.

And then, Big and I did an episode of our podcast the other day about a collector of old Science Fiction books, and how magical a lot of those classic and/or forgotten stories were. So I decided that I would try and read something, a book, a Sci-Fi book. The one I chose was "Stranger in a Strange Land" by Robert E. Heinlein.
And wow, I am totally loving it. Some of the future the man wrote about is still futuristic to us, some of it is archaic now (especially the quaint, almost amusing sexism and racism, and the old fashioned way of talking and advertising), and some is right on the button.

I am so glad I picked this book up. Hopefully I'll actually finish this one, instead of abandoning it partway through, like I have . . . Wow, have I ever finished a book before?

Rish "Oh Learned One" Outfield

Which reminds me, I used to see "I Grok Spock" bumper stickers and buttons from time to time, and not having read SIASL I always thought they were incredibly stupid. Now that I get the reference, I realize that they were just incredibly nerdy. Fair enough.

2 comments:

Big Anklevich said...

I hope you like it man. I read that book about eight years ago, and didn't like it much at all. I think it might be that I just didn't grok it. When I saw that you had picked that book, I thought, "Oh no, there goes the resolution to read more classic sci-fi." But reading on, you said you enjoyed it, so you never can tell, I guess.

Abigail Hilton said...

Well, that's definitely an influential one - kind of the Bible of the hippie generation. I got it on Audible before I started school, and the book malfunctioned for some reason. I didn't get it working until after I discovered podcasts and have not yet gotten around to listening. I did like _Have Space Suite, Will Travel_ (sadly, the only Heinlein I've read). However I was about 2 minutes from turning off the player during the homemade space suit description. Fortunately, he stopped boring me before the critical moment. Good book.