{essay} ♛ emperor mollusk versus the sinister brain

>>>>RANDOM MUSINGS
i must confess, i honestly don't remember when i first became interested in fantasy. i mean, fairy tales and folklore had always interested me, but fantasy novels were something that i don't remember picking up and reading. regarding science fiction however, i remember well. the book was stadium beyond the stars [or least i think that's the title of the book]. in the book, humanity had colonized other planets in other solar systems, leaving earth as a wasted planet. though humans had lived in space for so long, they had yet to make first contact. the main character travels to the equivalent of the olympic games as a participant and gets pulled into a mystery/conspiracy. in the end, he sort of makes first contact. it was a great story and for some reason, though the main plot of the story and other odds and other little things have escaped my memory, i do have a warm spot in my heart for it.

nevertheless, i never thought that the genre of science fiction and fantasy would become one of my favorites. i submerged myself head first into the fantasy genre around the time when the lord of the rings movies came out. no, i didn't get sucked into reading the series that way [in fact, i have yet to read the novels]. instead, i started reading the works of david eddings [and his wife leigh eddings]. before long, a couple of trips a week to the library would find me in the fantasy section reading almost anything that caught my sight.

one thing i found extremely annoying was the fact that the science fiction books were interspersed among the fantasy books. what's worse, the section was titled SF [a popular abbreviation for speculative fiction]. personally i called it science fantasy, but i was still peeved that the two sections were joined together along with a variety of other books. i mean if they go to such great lengths to separate the comic books from the rest of the fiction books, why couldn't they separate the fantasy and science fiction into separate sections?

but over time, i learned to ignore this peeve of mine and get on with my life.

now 5 years or so later as i try my own hand in writing, i've come to realize that science fiction and fantasy do in some cases overlap. take for instance anne mccaffrey. her stories feature a world in which humans travel to and inhabit. as time goes on, they settle into a sort of medieval lifestyle that is commonly prevalent in high fantasy/epic fantasy.

so... perhaps there are some elements of fantasy in the science fiction novel emperor mollusk versus the sinister brain.