Because first impressions are important aren’t they? They certainly are with books, first impressions can have me picking a book up straight away or deciding not to bother at all. What’s the first thing that grabs you about a book? Cover art? The blurb? For me it could be either or a mixture of the two, with this book it was the blurb on the back. Check it out,
SHINE is a collection of near-future, optimistic SF stories where some of the genres brightest stars and some of its most exciting new talents portray the possible roads to a better tomorrow. Definitely not a plethora of Pollyannas (but neither a barrage of dystopias), SHINE will show that positive change is far from being a foregone conclusion, but needs to be hardfought, innovative, robust and imaginative. Let’s make our tomorrows shine.
Now, I’m pretty sure I don’t read enough sci-fi but what I have read comes across as very negative in terms of the worlds it portrays. If we’re not being beaten down by rampaging machines then an evil genius has got us all downtrodden in his sinister utopia. This technology was supposed to make things better for us, wasn’t it?
I didn’t even know I was in need of some optimistic sci-fi until I saw this blurb and now I’m wondering how I could have ever not known. ‘Shine’ has been bumped right up the pile and will be read in the next week or so, all on the strength of a few lines of blurb.
What? Oh yeah, questions! I’m sure there must be other ‘optimistic sci-fi’ out there that I’m missing, what is it? And are there any genres that you feel are a little too negative and could do with being more optimistic?
All comments welcome!
4 comments:
First impressions are best as you said my friend blogger. The novel misses some optimism in it as the reviewer described. but over all i felt reading a different science friction movie of different kind.
There are optimist sci-fi books, but not recently (and most of them belong to the "social" sci-fi genre.
Early works by E.E. Van Vogt are like this (superscience), some of the Asimov Robot books, The Dispossessed for example too.
But if you want to read optimist "science fiction reality" right now, look at this blog:
http://builders.reprap.org/
Well, i'm sure it does not escape most of them that many people would start building weapons with this, but the potencial is there for something really disruptive.
I read this post just before coming here
http://www.lemodesittjr.com/blogs/blog/2010/02/difficulty-of-optimism.html
spooky??!!
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