The best sci-fi I ever read

In the past five weeks, I’ve been posting about the best 5 books of my adulthood, and I was (but also wasn’t) surprised that it was all fantasy. I mean, it makes sense since it’s certainly a genre that’s closest to my heart. At the same time, I feel like it gives a wrong impression of me reading only fantasy, which is certainly not true. Right now, e.g., I’m making my way through Zimbardo & Boyd’s The Time Paradox – psych non-fiction that promises to tell me what “time zone [I] live in”. (In negative past, apparently. Although, to be fair, the option of “in an alternative universe” is missing in the book.)

So here’s just a follow-up on the previous Top 5 posts – to hopefully slightly amend the picture of me and to offer book tips to people who do not go through life believing there’s a big, closed iron gate hanging in the air right behind their window.

(Note that I’m only talking about books I read as an adult. I’ll come back to some of my older favorites later on.)

The best sci-fi I ever read…

I always feel like, with everything I am, I should be a huge fan of sci-fi. And I indeed appreciate a good sci-fi movie, but I’ve had some trouble finding sci-fi books that would truly speak to me. I’m also not always sure what counts as sci-fi and what as fantasy. Like, where does Dune go?

Considering this, I enjoyed Asimov’s The Caves of Steel, a cross-over between sci-fi and a detective story. Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness was also great, although I perceive it more as a historically significant book than something I’d love to read again and again.

However, speaking of reading something, again and again, the best sci-fi book I read and re-read is certainly…

The story is set in the post-apocalyptic world where most people get mysteriously blind and easily fall prey to “triffids” (plant-like… aliens…? I’m still not sure what they are). The disturbing thing about the book is that it is weirdly quiet and intimate. There are no big battles, flame-throwers, there is no courageous monster slaying. It’s just one person trying to survive in a disintegrating world, no more or less heroic than anyone else. And somehow, that makes it so much more chilling than any Marvel movie I’ve ever seen.

“When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.”

Already as a kid, I was entranced by the idea of a post-apocalyptic world and how to navigate it. I remember packing my little backpack with items I would have wanted to take with me had something happened. (I wish I remembered what I put in!) I first read Triffids when I was 22. It was summer, and the annual Brno firework show competition, Ignis Brunensis, was starting. The first firework is traditionally launched above the Špilberk Castle. I recall sitting on a tram, seeing the fireworks go wild in the sky, the colors reflecting off the tram windows, people stopping in the streets, looking up, and I was thinking to myself… what would happen if everyone went blind right now? Triffids or not, what would you do? Where would you go?

“It must be, I thought, one of the race’s most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that “it can’t happen here”—that one’s own little time and place is beyond cataclysms. And now it was happening here.”

(What a timely quote…)