![]() ![]() No shame there, just human combinatorial realities. Yet just as every child is unique, so is every child also categorizable into broad predictible patterns of character and behavior. That would be like saying that no newborn infant has any potential to amuse or enlighten, simply because there have already been born X billions of people on the planet. Now, this is not to say that there is no pleasure in the new avatars of old concepts, the reimaginings of what was once previously imagined, the fresh couture over old bones. ![]() ![]() But the essential recycling and retrofitting and reverse engineering continues generally unabated. Oh, sure, once in a blue moon some radical new conceit arises, such as the Singularity, and for a time the field is refreshed, before settling back to the familiar churn. (First adult SF book encountered: Raymond Jones’s The Year When Stardust Fell in 1964.) Old themes, tropes, riffs and plots recirculate in endless cycles, accreting new bits and sophistications, but always revealing their essential lineaments through whatever new clothes they may don. Or maybe that’s just the feeling one gets when one has been a reader of science fiction contiuously for the past fifty years, as I have. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |