“If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature.”
- Edgar Rice Burroughs
I certainly agree with Mr. Burroughs, however, I do not believe that is the base line for which we should settle. So much more can be (and has been) achieved by fiction. Harry Potter get’s kids to read, and that’s a good thing. But why couldn’t it have been written as a piece of science fiction. I know – so many people will groan, conjuring images of prosthetic laden aliens. But that’s not what I’m talking about. It could have been an epic piece of near-future, terrestrial fiction. Why am I so hung up on this point? It’s a matter of framing.
Last week was the ten year anniversary of The Matrix, this October will be the ten year anniversary for Fight Club, two of my favorite movies. Because these two movies were released in the same year, I’ve always thought of 1999 as being a good year for film, but I just went back and looked, and it was a great year. I was able to quickly pull together a short list of movies that I really enjoyed. I’m a little saddened because there just doesn’t seem to be as many good movies coming out. The only thing I can say for the last decade is that Judd Apatow and his group of actors have made a couple great movies, and we’ve seen some good (and one great) comic book movie. But as much as I enjoyed the Dark Knight, it was not any where near as much as I enjoyed some of these movies.
When I was very young, probably seven, I used to play a game called ‘The Secret of Monkey Island’. It was my first computer game. We had a 386 that ran DOS, and that was the first game we got that wasn’t educational software. Ironically, it’s probably the game I learned the most from. I was in first grade at the time and I was at the point that I was honing my ability to reading, past learning, but not yet to the point of reading with ease. The game dialog is all text and I can remember sitting, pausing the game as each line of dialog came up and slowly reading through. I played the game religiously, literally, as an act of homage to my childhood. I made a point of playing that game once a year, until we got rid of that computer. The last time i played the game was probably about a decade ago, maybe a little more. Probably once a year, for the last few years I would go on a short lived quest to try and find the game again. Because Lucasarts is still around, it’s not abandonware, so it’s not easily available. However, because the game is nearly twenty years old, it’s not for sale any more. So my quests to find it have always ended in disaster. I was more than willing to pay for a copy, but I could not even find one for sale that was likely to work with any of my computers. 
I love good science fiction. Unfortunately, good science fiction is hard to find. I’ve chosen five of my favorite sci fi books that I would recommend with out hesitation.