Becca Stareyes

( <i>'The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions.' </i> -- Claude Levi-Strauss )

It says something about me that I saw this post on metaquotes, and knew where each of the quotes .

Clarke's "The Star" was also one of the first SF stories I read that stuck to me. Sure, I had read a lot of forgettable YA SF as a kid, and we had a unit of SF lit in 8th grade*. And I was a Trekkie space geek. But that story actually gave me the punch to the gut that made me realize that you could do some amazing stuff with SF (and short stories -- I was a novel kind of gal, the longer, the better). That was also around the time crisi83 started loaning me Heinlein**.

* I remember two stories from that. One was Ray Bradbury's "The Sound of Thunder". The other was a cute little story about gender roles and how worked up people get about them that was called something along the lines of "Project X". Come to think about it, I'd like to track that second one down.

** Whatever else I think about him now, Heinlein gets credit for cluing me in that (serial) monogamy or stereotypical harem-style polygyny is not the only way to run a culture.

I didn't quite get 2001 (the book is a lot clearer than the movie, but still left me with the 'okay... what?' impression), but I did read Rendezvous with Rama and was impressed -- here was this mysterious ancient spaceship that everyone was making a fuss over, and it was NEAT, and it was just here for our Sun, and not us at all. (Yes, I read the sequels. No, I didn't care for them. Except maybe for the aliens, which were neat.)

Now that i think about it, I think maybe I should try rereading 2001, and read Childhood's End, though I don't think it's my thing at all.