readingredhead | Got a funny feeling that I'm gonna float away... (Reply)

Hm. Well, been back home in the States since Monday night, and I'm just now writing another random entry. I have too much to do for this to really be termed "summer." I'm gone from 2:30-5:30 every Thursday for MUN summer sessions, and then I've got a topic synopsis to write for MUN, and I've got at least three summer reading books.

Bleh.

But I got home safe and sound, and I'm seeing some of my friends today. So that's a good thing.

I was just looking through the Europe pictures, some of them were really cool. I can't believe we were gone a month; I can't believe that I'm home now. I'm definitely going back, though; definitely to London. I absolutely loved it there, and I know that I could live there, no problem. Maybe not for the rest of my life, but I could see myself doing postgrad work at Oxford or Cambridge...maybe I should apply to be a Rhodes Scholar...

But enough rambling. I have also discovered that I am reading a sci-fi book that was published in 1954: The Stars Are Ours by Andre Norton. Very cool -- especially because, if I have my dates right, it was written before manned spaceflight. Heck, it's even pre-Sputnik! She wrote about scientists escaping from totalitarian rule on Earth, fleeing to the stars -- and all this before manned spaceflight had ever been deemed possible! In reading her work I find things that appear constantly in modern sci-fi -- the idea of cold sleep, antigrav vehicles called "sleds"...it's crazy because both appear in use consistently by Anne McCaffrey, whose first book was published in 1979, 25 years after Norton's novel. And according to Julie E. Czerneda, the concept of "force blades" (aka lightsabers, though not called that until George Lucas used the idea) was Norton's as well.

I have decided that I really like old-school sci-fi...but enough talking about it, I think I'm off to read it!