Speculative fantasy fiction and science fiction: an escape from life and reality

If you read speculative fiction stories, you are a very special person. You, the reader, bring these stories to life. The creation of any character is possible even for me, a thirteen-year-old boy back then, now a mature man. In these days of uncertain financial turmoil, do you feel like you want to escape life for just a few hours? Escape from this world of disunity and chaos is essential. It is not just today that we need to do this. The confusion of world events that in turn affect us and the way we live has been here for centuries. In times past before books there were storytellers. They told stories passed down by others from their own minds. My own grandfather was a storyteller who told me stories when I was very young.

The advent of books passed the stories on to thousands more and little by little a global market emerged. Today, our young people are immersed in movie videos and computer games to escape reality, and the best are based on stories from books. The golden creativity of the 1950s of my teens had a great impact on me. The music changed considerably. From the smooth sound of big band and jazz, rock and roll emerged and the creation of what I describe as the great emotional ballad. The music screamed at the teenagers of that time, men and women now in their 60s and 70s. Due to the wonderful advancement of technology, I now sing those songs. As a kid in Sheffield, I would walk miles to different local theaters to see the week’s movies, including Abbott and Costello, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, George Formby, and a host of escapist sci-fi. Even at a certain Sunday school they showed fifteen episodes, one each week of Flash Gordon.

The decade brought great changes to many markets. In the UK, if you didn’t pass your eleven plus (a test you took when you were eleven years old), you were put in the junk heap at work. The establishment considered you inferior. It took great personal pain and commitment to fight to get out of it. Schools then had their share of poor academic teachers. Highly qualified men and women who could not teach! Teaching is not something that can be judged by placing ticks on paper. It is a strong quality of interaction between teacher and student. The good teacher needs to report everything he knows in a way that provokes a response to the majority in a classroom, it is a vocation rather than a job. My father was a teacher I never knew; disappeared in the war on a plane somewhere over the ocean when I was two years old.

My imaginative side gave me a boost and kept me from getting depressed. It was a great era of science fiction and speculative fiction – The Forbidden Planet – The day the earth stood still, it was the classic movies of that time. Cinemascope and 3D movies emerged with thousands of comic books in stores illustrating strange alien creatures and superheroes. The Eagle comic was born with the famous character Dan Dare on the cover. Inside were pages of scientific knowledge of the time, not just written but illustrated in comic book form. At 6.45 pm on the radio was Dick Barton’s special agent and changing the channel to Radio Luxemburg at 7 pm you could hear Dan Dare’s pilot of the future. He was rich in the age of illusion and pulled your soul out of the physical monotony that surrounded him. Television has now taken over that option. In the 1970s and 1980s, life became more prosperous, you could earn a lot of money by working hard. This somehow eliminated the escapism and brought what was called ‘the kitchen sink drama’.

People immersed themselves in observing other problems. Like the Great Roman Empire, where crowds screamed to see if one gladiator could survive being killed by another or by a lion. Soap operas were flourishing and the movies followed with a series of heavy family drama. This has now evolved into reality television where humanity shows all the hatred, jealousy, stupidity and tribulations of real life. This is now slowly diminishing as the financial depression hits the world. Now, Doctor Who is back and flourishing once again, as is cinema with sci-fi and supernatural blockbusters. We have once again reached an age where we can all escape our life and our home for a couple of hours.

Today, people buy software and experiment in a “self-taught” environment. Hours are spent in word processing, much easier now than the old typewriter, then more hours in PDF to be able to create e-books. Creating a website required many hours of work, including HTML work. Then you mastered a movie show and posted various trailers on You Tube. All of this happened in the last 8 years, not bad for me at the age of 65 or older.

My first attempts at writing a novel were by hand and then by typewriter. It was a long process and due to the intense writing there was an indentation on my index finger where the pen rested. I don’t think modernism, the use of sex or bad words are necessary. In an advanced technology-based society of the future, there would be no need for foul-mouthed adjectives to give orders or directions. Therefore, I like to think that books can be read by teenagers upwards. However, the evil in men will scale to new limits, and that is ugly as any hero strives to finally defeat them.