Thursday, October 16, 2008

hey nineteen, no, we can't dance together

I just found out that Jack McDevitt is 73. If you don't know who Jack McDevitt is, he's an author. He writes science fiction. Speculative fiction. Whatever. Anyway, I've been on a sci-fi kick for a long time now (really ever since I seem to have exhausted the supply of halfway talented horror writers), and while it's not all I read, it does definitely make up a majority of my reading material. He's one of those authors that I started reading relatively recently - meaning in this decade, as opposed to people like Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke and Spider Robinson and Robert Heinlein and Philip K. Dick that I've been reading ever since I was a kid. He's great, too. If you enjoy the field, give him a try if you haven't already.

I'm kinda digressing. I've never really known too much about him, and so I vaguely assumed from the way he writes that he was a younger man than that. Not that I can really define in words the difference between a younger guy's writing and an older guy's writing, it was just a blurry subconscious impression. My mental picture of him, what there was of it, was of guy in his... oh, something like mid to late 50s. Guess the mental camera is out of focus. It probably also doesn't have enough megapixels, since I got it on the cheap.

It's not that I really care how old he is, I'm not an ageist or anything. I guess I just sort of thought that I'd be reading his books for the next 25 years or so, and now I have to adjust that number downward a goodish bit. Hopefully he'll live to be super-old and stay productive all the while.

God, that's so selfish. ^_^

While I'm at it, I'll mention that whilst wandering the intrawebs, I stumbled over a list of his Ten Favorite Science Fiction Novels. My own personal list would look different in a number of ways, but I would agree that all ten of the books he chose are excellent reads. Many of them are pretty "accessible," too. That's not exactly the word I want, but it's the one that's stuck in my brain, so I'm rolling with the punches. What I mean is that many of them are books that people who say "I don't read science fiction" would stand a good chance of enjoying anyway. So go read it and then go read them. Chop chop.

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