I hope you had a great holiday season. Mine was so fantastic I managed to lose two draft posts! Which is embarrassing when you’re supposed to be a professional programmer, and your blog is connected to GitHub. One of the highlights of my winter break (which wasn’t really a break because I work for a modern-day Scrooge & Marley) was finally getting around to watching Finch on Apple TV+. It was released in November of 2021, but in typical Eric fashion, I didn’t get around to watching it until after Christmas.

I’m revamping my author page, but wanted to save this little snippet about science fiction, my current work in progress and me. Good science fiction is about real life. It shows how individuals thrive when they have free will and wither when it’s taken away. How fear makes us stupid and understanding makes us smart. How civilizations inevitably arc toward tyranny, but also how heroes, who are normal folks like you and I, pull us back from the brink.

Science fiction is about the real world. That doesn’t mean it can’t be set on an alien planet, an alternate history, or an imagined future. It means that the story has a message about us. About society. About humanity. If that’s not there, it’s not science fiction. The late 1960’s - 1970s had a great run of films that did exactly that. Planet of the Apes (the original). Soylent Green.