Full Circle

You see, in first grade I liked astronomy a lot. I knew all the planets in order by size, distance from sun, and even number of moons. Well, back then, Saturn had only 18 moons, and Pluto was a planet.

Throughout elementary and middle school I liked math and science. Mostly math, because I was good at it. I was also spending a lot of time on chess.

But in high school, a few things changed. In ninth grade I somehow got obsessed with the issue of global warming: against the conventional theory. But that interest subsided. In tenth grade I found at a $1 book sale Martin Gardner’s Ambidextrous Universe. This tuned me into theoretical physics. In eleventh grade I read the play Waiting for Godot and started enjoying literature, which would be my primary obsession for the rest of high school. By graduation I had attempted writing a play in the spirit of Lewis Carroll. That was a month and a half ago.

Since then, this summer I’ve read a few more literary works. In like spirit I’ve watched a lot of movies. Ironically, after first trying to watch some old movies for historical interest, I got hooked onto the sci-fi genre. A list of sci-fi movies I watched this summer: Alien, Aliens, Alien vs Predator, Aliens vs Predator 2, Predator (but not yet the recently released Predators), Star Wars (Episodes I–VI, yeah, all six), Star Trek, Blade Runner, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now, if that seems excessive, compare to the list of literary works I’ve read so far this summer: Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut), The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexander Dumas), The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde), Lady Windermere’s Fan (Wilde), A Woman of No Importance (Wilde), An Ideal Husband (Wilde), Salomé (Wilde), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Phillip K. Dick), and currently reading Brave New World (Aldous Huxley). Both lists are in chronological order, though there is overlap. Now, it happens that the last two books in the list are both sci-fi. So guess what I’m doing now? Planning a sci-fi story. And although most of the story happens on a futuristic Earth, a key point in the plot takes place in space. Oh yeah, astronomy.