Drawn to it

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What draw you to Science Fiction or Fantasy
here is what fascinates me with Science Fiction

Human Cloning, Super Soldiers , Space colonization , mind uploading, genetic enhancements, space battles, cyborgs, technological advancements, futuristic military, space exploration, cyberspace,

I have a miserable life. Science fiction and fantasy takes me away from it, even if it's for a short time.

I enjoy some fantasy reading. It's the suspension of disbelief, and an escape from the "drabness" of reality. The impossible finds a way to exist, and coincide with interpersonal drama. It puts a new twist on the old.

I'm not just drawn to any fiction that I read. For the most part it's been Sci-fi, fantasy, or the action/adventure/thriller stuff set in modern day, but usually it's tied to whatever fad I'm in right now. Right now, I'm in a superhero fad, so most of what I've read over the past few weeks has been superhero related. I've read -- Nobody Get's the Girl, Cla$$Warfare, Wearing the Cape, Confessions of a D-List Supervillain, and started reading WildCards 1. I've also bought several Mutants & Masterminds 2nd ed rpg sourcebooks. I've done this before with other fads. Sometimes it's even Author Specific. I had a fad where I was buying and reading anything by Jack Vance, Roger Zelazny, Andre Norton, and others. I have about sixty+ of Andre Norton's novels and I only got through a third of them before I got out of the fad I had with her writing. Sometimes it's theme specific, an example being military themed, so I read Starship Troopers, Armor, The Honor Harrington series, Article 23, A bunch of stuff by Elizabeth Moon, stuff by Ian Douglas, and others. It varies.

I read fast, so I've read a lot of books. Sometimes I'll go through two to three books a day and then end up with the feeling of what am I going to do now.

Also sometimes I lose interest in a book or series and don't finish it. I've learned not to get rid of the book when I stop reading it through losing interest. I have a whole shelf with over fifty books that I know I can end up reading again when and if an interest returns. I've even dropped some pretty well known series such as Wheel of Time, and the Wizard's First Rule series mid way through because I just lose interest. I know at some point I'll finish them, but I just don't have an interest to do so at the current moment and I won't force myself.

It's something about the new and the novel and a sense of childlike wonder. There are real and wondrous things in, say, a thriller, but science fiction exposes us to things that are fascinating but unreachable and possibly even frightening in their immensity and strangeness. Fantasy taps into a sense of freedom and newness because of how pliable the fictional worlds are as well as a childlike fascination with the unreal and impossible.

Humans expand their reality through technological progress and sci fi explores the possibilities of this. I particularly like cyborgs, alien contact, changing consciousness through drugs (mind-altering drugs other than the ones we currently have are a feature of some sci fi) and especially future societies and changes in political and social structure due to changing environment and technology. Like what will happen to society when we do become cyborgs or if we meet alien races? I also like sci fi with no humans or hardly any humans in so I can see how whole alternative societies have developed in the different environments on other planets.

What I like in fantasy is how different races interact - like how elves see orcs and whatnot. What role vampires have in non-vampire society. Also like elemental magic because it appeals to that shamanistic manipulation of the natural world side of me.

Even though today I'm a horror fiction fan, I grew up listening to my Dad tell me of the science fiction, fantasy, and horror fiction he had read. My Dad had vivid descriptive powers which easily lit my imagination with excitement. I wanted to read about the same wonders he had. That, and I grew up with comic books and movies centering around that genre.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer