Writing and Reading Science Fiction

Sounds Good!

Advances in science and medicine have meant we can now predict the life expectancy – we can know how long everyone will live. We know if the life will be cut short. Everyone is given a medical passport when they turn 10. It is stamped with an expiration date. The last six months of anyone’s life is clear. And, as a result, society is a whole lot nicer. People are kind to each other because everyone can know when anyone is going to die. Suddenly it’s also clear that everyone has the same struggles they’re working through: Life.

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That little stub of a short story is something I wrote a month or so ago. I finished it there as basically a note to myself – it’s been lurking in my head for a while, I had this whole other idea around a single person outliving his medical passport. The months pile up, then a year or maybe two. And he starts taking more and more risks. Getting cocky, bucking the system, ignoring the system, living like a reengage – a vigilante even. He finds a few others like that, the same predicament. Or the same privilege. They have outlived their medical passport and have been ‘scrubbed’ as it were. They are ‘free’ and live outside the law. They form a small gang and seek to destroy the world at a quicker rate (if they can).

There was even an idea to add to that, a soldier of fortune is chosen to put a gang together to go head-to-head with these people – but how would they be paid if successful? Would they be granted a form of longevity, by being scientifically ‘developed’; would they then go on to perpetuate the same damage through the boredom of living longer.

This, if you couldn’t straight away guess, is my very first shot at science-fiction. And I saw it more as a movie-pitch than a novel or anything. Though we know novels are often made to be adapted. This is all coming from someone that is a bit of a sci-fi novice.

I say this because I don’t feel well-read in the genre of Science Fiction. I don’t gravitate to the sci-fi section of bookstores or video stores. I tick off the big ones – Blade Runners and the Aliens franchise and some Star Wars and Star Treks and so on. I love the films of John Carpenter as I said just the other day – so there’s some science fiction in there, and things like They Live are right up my alley. (Haha, alley).

But as a reader in particular I don’t go much for science fiction nor fantasy. And I wouldn’t mind changing that. So I’m looking for suggestions. I started Stephen King’s Dark Tower series and enjoyed the three I read. But it was so long ago that I’ll need to re-read those before I get on with the others.

So, I’m asking you for some help – I know names in sci-fi and speculative fiction. I have read The Left Hand of Darkness. But I have not read anything else by Urusla Le Quin. (Well, I read a book of poems she wrote actually, and I thought that was wonderful, but it doesn’t count for this conversation).

If I go back and think through what I’ve read there are a few titles, sure. But it’s a blur, mostly. And for every dark dystopian film that I love (EXistenZ) and for all the Carpenters and Cronenbergs out there making the sorts of horror/sci-fi films that I dig, there are so many worlds I’ve missed. I find it hard to climb on board, sometimes. But it’s more than that. I think I just don’t know where to start.

Perhaps I’m daunted by the idea of a series. I’ve worked in bookstores and been daunted by the volumes that add up in a sci-fi author’s catalogue. Where to start?

That’s where you come in today – I’d love some recommendations if you’re a science fiction reader.

Also – my story stub. I ended it there with the cod-philosophical bit about Life – so that it could stand on its own as a wee prose-poem type-thing. But I wrote it that way so it can stand as an idea to carry on with – I still think I’ve got the seed of a movie pitch eh. With parallels, no doubt, to our pandemic world and the potential rise of two types of people – the vaccinated and the unvaccinated.

I like the idea of it going from sci-fi/dystopia to full-throttle action. A big, daft popcorn flick – that’s not actually that dumb after all. We see the compassion that could be there. And we see it fall away. Because, well, humans…

But I also am fully aware that I’m probably just murdering an idea that’s already happened, and with far better execution on the part of the original author. “My” idea of this medical passport thing and the rise of a different class of person, that outlives their scientifically stamped used-by date…is it actually Ray Bradbury’s idea already? Or Philip K. Dick, etc…? I guess the good thing in all of this though is that if I have “stolen” it, I’ve done so with neither malice nor awareness. I have done so by fluke. And because ideas really are finite, or at least variations on riffs.

Please put me out of my misery there.

And ground me with some top science fiction reads that you’ve experienced, please?