Most of us have a favourite kind of novel. Over the Squamish Public Library's counter, I see on average more detective/murder mysteries and romances taken out than any other types of fiction.
Some of my favourite genres are science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction and time travel stories, which have an ancient but less-than-stellar history.
Arguably this type of fiction started with mythology; tales of superhuman gods of the Ancient Greeks helped them to explain the unexplainable. Thunder was caused by Zeus, flinging bolts down from Mount Olympus.
The seasons are explained by Persephone's absence from the Earth as she returns to Hades for winter every year.
The wonderful Arabian Nights tales were examples of fantasy: stories of things that are impossible.
That tradition has been carried on by such notable authors as J.R.R. Tolkien, with his Hobbit and Lord of the Rings trilogy, and J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, which has enjoyed unprecedented popularity with audiences both young and old.
Rowling's world of wizards is so perfectly realized that you are in it at once and away from reality as soon as you start reading.
From the '30s to '50s, lurid science fiction magazines and pulp books with busty ladies and giant spiders on the covers did a great deal to put serious readers off.
Poorly realized plots and bad writing also did the genre a disservice.
However, some science fiction authors are luminaries Isaac Asimov, Jules Verne, Franz Kafka, Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells and George Orwell.
Stephen King, one of North America's best known authors, has written sci-fi under his own name and the pseudonym Richard Bachman.
Canada's own Margaret Atwood was given the Arthur C. Clarke award in 1987 for her Handmaid's Tale. Her more recent Oryx and Crake is also obviously speculative fiction.
Several writers have made predictions with their books that have eerily become facts. John Brunner in his Stand on Zanzibar, 1968, tackles world overpopulation.
In his The Sheep Look Up, 1975, he writes of escalating worldwide ecological disasters.
The books are depressing and offer no hope. Arthur C. Clarke however was always optimistic with his fiction, non-fiction and film forays into the future.
He proposed a satellite communications system in 1945, which of course, has come to pass, and a space station held in geosynchronous orbit above the Earth with a cable. This idea is being worked upon at the present.
At its very best, science fiction is the literature of ideas - what might be, what could happen, other realities.
Larry Niven's Ringworld quartet introduces us to a world created with all of the material surrounding a star.
In other words, all of the solar system's planets are smashed and recreated as a ring orbiting around its star at the same distance the Earth orbits our sun, giving a vast ring of "planet" held in place by gravity.
As the Ringworld is so enormous, human-like creatures develop in astonishingly different ways in different areas.
Some regress to tribal life, some develop technically beyond belief.
British Columbia is home to some of the most notable writers of science fiction. William Gibson, whose Neuromancer in 1984 gave us the concept of cyberspace and the word cyberpunk.
Spider Robinson's stories of time travellers meeting at Callahan's Crosstime Saloon are hilarious.
Would you like to have some input as to what the library purchases? Watch this fall for an upcoming survey to see what you would prefer to have offered in terms of materials and formats at the library. Your input is needed.
