An appreciation

Early on Friday morning, one of the few people who have managed to influence my life without ever having met me passed away. The story starts in 1983, at the then Katunayake airport where I was waiting with my father to see off my uncle. After 3 years of watching Blakes 7, I knew what a space station looked like, so when I saw one on the cover of a paperback copy of '2001' in an airport bookstore, I asked my father to buy it for me, and was pleasantly surprised when he did, just like that!

A few pages later I was hooked - I still remember everybody else watching TV that night and me sitting under a fluorescent light in the hall, unable to put the book down. I guess I was still too young to fully appreciate the science, but I could certainly enjoy the fiction! The only science fiction I had read at the time was the novelization of Blakes 7 by Terry Nation, so I remember feeling a little dazed by the time I finished off 2001, and realizing that this was something completely different altogether!

I was hooked after that and I started going through everything written by Sir Clarke available at the public and school libraries, friends' collections (there were a few sci-fi buffs in my class by then) and the second hand book stores in Darley road, when I could get my mother to take me there. Imperial Earth, Rendezvous with Rama, Childhood's End, Fountains of Paradise and a few other of his books had the same effect on me that 2001 did; for about half an hour after finishing each of these I was almost high, not really knowing what a high was at the time! I guess I was either still stuck in my imagination or maybe it was just my mind trying to open up a little more to accommodate the new possibility that had been presented to it!

I still do get the same feeling when I finish off a great book or movie and to some degree I think I only read books or watch movies when I think there is a possibility of such a 'mind-expansion'. This explains why there is so little non-science fiction in my lists of favorite books or movies - very few have that 'wasabi effect' on my brain that sci-fi can!

A few years later my father bought me my first computer, a Sinclair ZX81, which I think I called HAL, though it could have been called Zen or Orac because I never lost my love for Blakes 7 either. I wrote my first code on that machine and I guess I've been coding ever since! It took me about 20 years more to get myself a 'department store telescope' and I'm still not done with space!

I guess what I'm saying is that the books I read as a kid had a great influence on what I've been passionate about all my life (soon after I publish this post, I'll be getting back to reading 'American Gods' or watching an episode of 'Enterprise'). I really can't imagine being as happy with any other profession as I am with Software, and I shudder to think what I would have been left with for entertainment had I not been introduced to science fiction when I was ('maha gedara' every evening - noooooo)! Maybe some other author would have got me hooked on the future anyway, but since it was you, thank you Sir Arthur C. Clarke!