A
Silicon Valley survey by The Atlantic, published in its November
issue, found the “greatest work of science fiction ever written”
to be Asimov's Foundation
novels. For their next choice the techies picked Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy.
If Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud got
any votes its total would have come in somewhere behind Star
Wars,
which captured the only honorable mention.
I've
read nothing by Asimov, and the closest I came to Hitchhiker's
Guide
was to pluck it off the bookstore shelf, read the cover blurb and the
first few paragraphs, and return it to the shelf. Science Fiction has
so never been my thing I feel awkward just using the genre's
vernacular abbreviations. For the sake of brevity in this instance,
though, I'll grit my teeth and leap over what seems to be the
no-longer-in scifi
straight to what I sense is the current password: SF?
Or is it lower case?
On
second thought I probly wasted most of the previous paragraph
building a defense against presumed sf
snobbery. This because I just remembered various devoted sf
fans
have assured me they were unfamiliar with The
Black Cloud,
and I don't believe they were patronizing me. All the same, as a
precaution I fought to withhold any implication of “gotcha” for
having read what I considered a prerequisite for anyone pretending
intimacy with the literature.
