Personal Archaeology

Some time ago I was shoveling out my room (this is a more or less constant process, as my room is never fully shoveled out) and stumbled across a collection of writings from my not-so-halcyon days as an eighth grade middle school student.

There wasn't anything especially bad about my life back then, to be honest, there was just the overwhelming and undeniable fact that I was in middle school. But I digress.

Its strange, to look back and see how my style has evolved over the years. There were hints of my sense of humor even back then. It was also painful to see the pomposity that pervaded my science fiction. I was a conceited little shit when I was writing sci-fi. I used to think that hard science fiction--serious, factual, and scientifically-supported--was the One True Way. I came to this conclusion after being exposed to far too much Star Trek and Michael Crichton. It took me a long time to discover that, while hard sci-fi is all well and good, that space opera is way more fun. I'll take high adventure in hard vacuum over believable military tactics anyday.

It was also strange just how caught up I was in science fiction. I'm not sure I had any real awareness of fantasy as a genre at that point. I'd read Lord of the Rings, but I'm not sure if I fully comprehended it. Which is an odd distinction, but one I've run across often enough that I'm not afraid to make it. It took me a long while to actually understand how difficult it was to write good science fiction. There's a certain suspension of disbelief inherent to fantasy that I find much easier to work with nowadays. I still attempt to make the worlds believable (insofar as they need to be), but I don't have to worry about having thoughts like, "Wait...shit. Relativity. Dammit."

That's a freedom I'm rather fond of.

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"Leave my mother out of this."