The Old Order

Here's something I wrote while I was in the hospital, presented here for no particular reason:

My mom bought me an ancient anthology of Isaac Asimov science fiction short stories at a yard sale for me to read while I was in the hospital. Read them I did. Asimov was never my favorite, but how can one argue with a man whose personal publishing career runs to some 500-plus volumes? He writes "idea stories", driven by interesting (or not) ideas or sometimes just bad puns, and never really gets too wrapped up in characters or even really plot.

But that's not the point. In reading this collection of short stories, I was put in mind of the gentle days of science fiction in general, which for me stretched from about 1968 to maybe 1988. Plenty of SF did I consume in those years, often simply *because* it was SF. Was it good? Doesn't matter; it said "SF" on the cover so I read it. I was even a partisan in the gentle debate between Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov on whether hair length was directly or inversely proportional to writing talent.

But for the last twenty years, I've been almost completely out of the habit of reading science fiction. The last true SF novel I read was one of those sly "you think it's by Arthur C. Clarke but it's really by someone else" efforts, and while I can't say that one single book killed my interest in SF, it is interesting that I haven't really been back since. Something changed in the mid-1980s, something that seemed to suck the enjoyment out of SF. Was it the nature of the literature that changed? Or was it just me, growing old and stodgy with a mortgage?

There's no way back into the past, and I don't think there's any way, or for that matter any reason, to try to rekindle a deep interest in science fiction. But there is a part of me that misses the old order, when Asimov and Clarke and Heinlein were the kings of the realm, when "new guys" (how that amuses me) like Larry Niven were trying to force their way into the popular culture of science fiction conventions, when Ringworld was fresh and everyone was still alive.

Still alive... They're all dead, you know. Almost all of them. Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Fred Saberhagen, Gordon Dickson, Robert Heinlein. All the masters of my youthful fling with SF are dead and gone, some of them dead and gone for a long time - Asimov died in 1992 and I didn't even know until I Googled him just the other day. Maybe what I miss isn't the old order of the well-regulated science fiction universe as it existed in the Seventies; maybe I just feel the passing of my own years and figure that missing the Old Masters of SF is somehow less self-absorbed than whimpering over my own inevitable aging.