Four Reasons Why I Am An Astronout…Not

I was actually going to tell you about the joys of reading 5.0 years Prior Han Solo Adventures: At Star’s Ends, when one has eminent End Semester exams but crazy thought processes has expanded this modest post into a listing of the four weirdest popular culture reasons why I have ever taken time out of the self absorbed world that I live in and looked up at the stars to wonder.

Here goes:

4. LOST IN SPACE (THE 1960S SHOW)

I was in second grade, section A to be precise. Star Plus was still an English channel and didn’t have a single ‘K’ serial. It was a Science class and we had a teacher who was teaching us about the planets.

Me (interrupting her somewhere between Neptune and Pluto): Mam, How many planets has man landed on?

Teacher: what? None, of course

Me (still terribly sure): but in lost in sp…

Teacher: Don’t be stupid. Man has not landed on any planet. Now, moving on, Pluto is the 9^th pl…

Now, it wasn’t that I actually believed in Lost in Space! There were no talking robots; no way would a family be sent up in space; no way could there be so many hospitable panets were they could so easily land; as for aliens – pfft; all imaginative, of course. I wasn’t that stupid! But the point was, I kinda thought that man must have landed somewhere at least. Just like they did on the moon. Maybe, just one step and all that jazz.

But my Science Teacher got it right (except for the Pluto part of course) and I remember this as being one of the most formative experiences of my short life span – right up there with finding out that plants use both Carbon dioxide AND Oxygen and Disney Movies horribly distort the truth. Lost in Space was my first science fiction show and I remember it in a vague affectionate albeit irritated light. Why? I remember thinking, even back then, did the boy have all the adventures while the girl stayed back near their space ship and tended after their little alien gardens? Still it was, like I said, my first sci-fi show and it is still the first show that I think of every time I see the weird silver air-conditioning fittings in our college library; but that’s another story all together.

3. FARSCAPE 1999- 2003

Hands down. I LOVED this show. There were no super intelligent shades of blue, but there were super intelligent bald blue priestesses, there were cuter less irritating robotic bugs, a villain who lived in the hero’s head and had philosophical discussions with him and my god! A ship that reproduced…like got pregnant and gave birth and everything…

The storyline in itself was hardly unique. You take a reasonably good looking American guy with a father’s unfulfilled dream and let him fly an experimental space ship and you can bet my arse that Houston, there-will-be-a-problem and he’ll get lost and thrown in with a bunch of aliens. But the execution of the simple premise was done with such flair towards ensuring equal parts adventure, humour, ridiculousness and ensuing craziness that I cannot but love this show. In its heights, I had the Farscape font, knew the theme song dialogue by rote and would quote dialogue from the show and laugh at the normal people who didn’t get it.

2. TIE-IN BOOKS

I’ve never seen Star Trek…the original one that is and maybe because I’ve not seen that I’ve never actually watched the rest of its brood. But I know Star Trek, in a manner of speaking; read its lore. The awesome fan base for the show will scoff at my at best second hand knowledge for the show which springs from reading a little too many of its tie-in novels and loving them. Weirdly enough, I’ve found I like tie in novels of Star Trek, and the same now goes for the Star Wars ones that feature Han Solo (though I seem to exclusively like the ones before he actually meets Luke and the rest in the original movies.) This maybe because of my innate love for all types of fan fiction but I am always surprised that I like the Star Trek ones even though I’ve not seen the show

1. GATTACA -1997

Now this one is a lie. I just wanted to talk about it. Yes, It is a sci-fi movie; yes, the final destination is the space unknown (or Titan to be more precise) but the movie is, to put it at my corniest, about a lot more than that. I cannot talk about this movie without waxing ineloquently about it. I saw it when I was younger and it’s probably gonna stay with me all my life. Suffice, to say, you have to watch this movie and ‘to each his own’ be damned because you better not get back to me and tell me that you didn’t like it.

Reading as an Obligation

Back when I had my one year fling with literature, I knew a lot of people who were serious about reading – academically. They picked up tomes upon tomes of indigestible works for their supposed “literary” value and read through them with single minded devotion . I usually had a problem as to how they ascribed the merit to the book – was it because they or someone they knew had enjoyed it or was it because it dealt with something that resonated with them or was it simply because they had loved the spiky red glittery title on the front page?

9 out of 10 times it was because it had won some high brow prize; Now, I am in no way dissing the high brow prize winning books because they usually are good, but something that always bothered me was how some of them seemed to read exclusively these books and not others; how some just assumed that the book had to be good because it won the prize; or even weirder how some assumed that they HAD to read the book because it won the prize – like an obligation if you will.

Not quite sure why I am bothering with this, considering that, all I wanted to do was write about the vampire books, I’ve just finished. Maybe it’s some sort of opening defense for the choice of books, I’ve been reading.