I've had a love-hate relationship with science fiction since my teens. My first few forays into the genre began with the novels of Star Wars. I hated them. The particular novels I picked up were full of jargon that made Chewbacca sound poetic in comparison, disjointed plot lines and ten billion peripheral characters who either have a remarkable propensity to die or escape death.

There were limits to being a geek: I found mine real fast.

Later, by chance, I stumbled upon novels by Ben Bova. Not exactly sci-fi literati, but they were majorly entertaining. Plus they inevitably featured front covers with gorgeous and exotic spacescapes and/or majestic spaceships. Awesome.

From Ben Bova, I went on to Greg Bear, Stephen Baxter, Ursula K. Le Guin. With the exception of the latter's Earthsea canon, I usually gravitated to the subgenre of sci-fi that revolved around space and the universe. Big weapons, hyperspace, wormholes, death of the Sun. Stuff like that.

So naturally when my eyes caught a module titled "Understanding the Universe", I immediately took note (another module that caught my attention was Science Fiction and Fantasy but the last literature module sort of scared me off literature for a while). As I remember, it had a perfect module description. I can't reproduce it now, but it was exotic, exciting, different. Not the usual Physics module (thermodynamics.. bleah). So why not, I thought. At the very most, I'd just feel like Harry Potter taking Divinition classes.

Man. Divinition is probably more exciting.

So far, it has been a disappointment. I believe the lecturer is keeping something up her sleeve. She's asking us whether we know that Earth rotates around its own axis, only because she's saving the best for last. She has to be. I refuse to contemplate otherwise. Therefore, we shall get hyperspace, wormholes, Planck's constant, anti-matter, String theory, Minkowski space, Fermat's last theorem and the Fornax Dwarf galaxy after we've established that the Earth revolves around the sun and that there are nine planets in our solar system (technically speaking there's also 2003 EL61, 2003 UB313, Sedna and a host of other Kuiper Belt objects {ignoring the lil fact that Sedna lies outside of the Kuiper Belt}, but what the heck. She says nine, I'll play along...).

Patience, patience. The day will come. Until then, I have to go work on how much distance a light-year really is.

Duh. As if hyperspace warps wouldn't take care of that.

Filed under: SF, Personal