Why did I need so much science fiction in my life when I was younger?

Why did I need so much science fiction in my life when I was younger? Do not get me wrong, I still like science fiction, but certainly not as much as I use to. Did I need a massive escape from reality? Did I need something to strive for? Did I want to be an astronaut? Of course I did! I wanted to be an astronaut as much as any young lad who grew up with Apollo Saturn launches every few months and then Skylab.

As you get older, or at least as I got older that I realised that a lot of the stuff I watched, listened to and read was merely chaff, with the odd bit of wheat in the pile. I still like the older stuff of Arthur C Clarke (A Fall of Moondust, The Sentinel, 2001 A Space Odyssey) and Isaac Asimov (any of the robot stories), but I was ‘blinkered’ by TV and started getting into stuff that was frankly rubbish.

Science fiction when I was younger was best on radio and in book form. BBC radio decided to broadcast Douglas Adams serial ‘The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy’ and then repeats of the classic 1950s ‘Journey into Space’. Oh what a time I had eyes closed, listening to the adventures of Ford Prefect and Andrew ‘Jet’ Morgan and seeing the vast journeys through time and space in my mind. The problem with TV science fiction was the special effects or rather the lack of ‘special’ in the effects. Some of them were very ropey indeed, making them laughable. The problem was that the stories were sometimes extremely good, hence the reason they worked better in radio and in book.

I now look at my collection of books and see less science fiction and more fiction, as well as history, travel and biography. I like books, I really do. When I have time, I lose myself in a great writer like Len Deighton (The Game Set and Match novels and their sequels Faith, Hope and Charity) or John Le Carré, especially the early Smiley novels (check out A Call for the Dead).

I look at my bookshelf and see collections of Ian Fleming (Bond from the 1950s novel is a very different man from Bond of the movies, at least until Daniel Craig took over). I see many books by Agatha Christie (the queen of crime), Chris Ryan, Andy McNab (a bit of gratuitous violence never goes a miss). Alistair MacLean (Guns of Navarone being the best), Frederick Forsyth (The Shepard, Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, etc), travel books by Michael Palin and Pete McCarthy as well as the aforementioned Len Deighton and John Le Carré.

I was going to apologise for getting a bit ‘blokey’ with the books that I have mentioned, but these are after all the random jottings of a random mind, and it is my mind, so there!