April 12, 2006

Reading List Thus Far

Finished up Issac Asimov's I, Robot, continuing in my tradition of missing out on popular current movies and resorting to reading the original "book" version.

You know how they say science fiction is at heart social satire, that it shows more about the era and culture of the book's writing than of the fictional future depicted in the story? Bang on with this book.

Much of the book takes place in the early 21st century--er, right now. So there are references to events taking place in 2004 and 2006 that are pretty funny. Did Asimov think we were going to be that advanced 50 years into the future?

Yet they're still very "1950s". All the characters smoke cigarettes, even on some faraway space station. The whole notion of needing to take motion pictures for surveillance, instead of ubiquitous video everywhere (think Rodney King, London's street cams) produced a chuckle. But Asimov did get the whole flat-panel TV thing down with those "visiplates".

Next up: Philip Dick's The Minority Report and Other Classic Stories. I just watched Code 46 and I guess I'm going on a dystopian science fiction run for a while.

Posted by jameshom at April 12, 2006 02:44 PM | TrackBack
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