Past and Future (DOG EAR)
Past and Future (DOG EAR)
kay, everyone who reads (and only true readers find their way down to these dusty vaults) sees those things on Facebook – “How many of these classics have you read?” “The top 100 science fiction books”. In short, pretentious rubbish. If you are a reader, you read everything. Not just cowboy novels, not just scifi, not just detective or manly-hero or any of that other stuff – you read across the fields, taking in this and that and never hesitant to try anything new (or loaned).
I wasn’t even thinking this was we walked over to Juniors, the little diner we eat at every Sunday we can. We take our books, snag a booth, and enjoy the food, the crazy background roar (complete with occasional dishfall), all that. And our books.
I had my late father’s iPad with me, loaded up with Kindle titles I’d loaded from Project Gutenberg. The one I was currently reading, After London, was winding down. I knew that Gutenberg always puts a load of legal crap in the end of their works so often you’ll suddenly come to the end while you’re thinking you had twenty pages to go (anyone who’s ever read a paper book and found a “coming soon” section for the next book knows this letdown). So, yes, I needed a spare book.
Back on point, After London is a book written in 1880 or so, dealing with an England depopulated and regressed back to the feudal age, a strange world with kings and castles and a plague-patch that was the former city of cities.
Yet carried, the backup, Yukikaze, a story of a flier who flies against the mysterious JAM, a race that punched a hyperspace hole through to our world. He flies his super combat jet, named after the title, and tries to make sense out of an enemy nobody has seen, while flying a jet which is becoming increasingly self-aware.
As we walked home following lunch (moving from shade patch to shade patch, avoiding the Florida summer sun), I had to think about my odd mix of books, the far-away past (written about an apocalyptic future) and a near-time future (written about the limits of man’s understanding). Yes, they were both so opposite you’d expect the two books to push apart like magnets. But no, they complement themselves nicely. I think once I clear the tales of Felix, son of a failed noble, I’ll be ready fir Rei Fukai and his spooky jet.
I don’t want to get in a rut.