Excuses, Excuses

[mrissa]

I got an e-mail note this afternoon from the historian who wrote one of the books I read earlier this month. She was googling on her book and found my mention of it on my journal, and she wrote to express her surprise and very politely inquire, "What does a young writer of sci fi find in a work of history?"

And I thought, heh, ohhhhh, lady, do you not know anything about this job.

I mean, seriously: for what other profession in the world could reading anything, anything at all, be considered professional development? And yet I am hard pressed to come up with a book that absolutely positively could not relate to my work either now or someday in the future. Whenever I need an excuse, I have one readily available at all times now.

And an Inquisition microhistory is not at all the most obscure volume of history ever read by a young SF writer. Not even by this young SF writer. Possibly not even this month. Why? Because we're geeks, the lot of us, geeks and intellectual magpies.

And it's so much fun.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Has the historian never read any sci fi? I'm not a writer, but I've read some sci fi and in many cases it involves many aspects of history or requires knowledge of the area, setting, etc. Apart from which, don't people just read to be informed? Again, I'm not a writer, but I love to read just so that there are new things to think about and new points of view to look at and in order to do this, there's sci fi, historical fiction, history, self help, sociology work, psychology work, etc, etc, etc. If you didn't read these, wouldn't your viewpoint get to be somewhat myopic? Just amazed that a person wouldn't see the value or interest someone in general, let alone a sci fi writer, would have in reading a particular book.

Heathah

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

You know, I think a lot of academics are used to their family members not being interested in their fields. There is such a thing as a writer of popular science or popular history books, but this person was clearly not one of them. So I can see where she might feel a little isolated from anyone who wasn't working in her sub-field of history.