Coming to Live in a Science Fiction World: Generativity and the Metaphor of the Web

This reminiscence of my Time Journey explores the role of science fiction (and eventually science fantasy) in the varying stages in my psychological and professional development. Beginning with the ages of 5–12, I show how science fiction stories became a favorite boy’s pastime for me and an outlet for shaping my imagination regarding science, technology, and literature. It also became an impetus for becoming a voracious reader who for much of my early-to-mature adult life consumed at least a book/week. My Time Journey then morphs into a stage during adolescence where this underappreciated “ghetto” genre became a teenager’s avocation illuminating the wonders of the Missile and Space Age in fifties’ America. With the coming of my undergraduate and graduate years, science fiction reading began to infiltrate into my emerging professional identity, turning it into an increasing tool of political analysis for looking critically at prevailing social and technological conditions and imagining alternatives. The onset of mature adulthood and a tenured professorial status in academia allowed the speculative fiction of serious SF/F writers like Ursula Le Guin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Fredrick Pohl, and William Gibson to extend the boundaries of my increasingly ecological imagination to serve as a professional’s guide to Earth and the cosmos. With the formal end of a teaching career as I reached the mid-seventies, twenty-first century SF—my lifelong companion to life, the world, and the stars—assumed a retiree’s vista on eco-spirituality and the mysteries of the universe.