Forever war

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn't exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.
RAY BRADBURY, The Paris Review, spring 2010

My reading usually veers widely between genres, but looking back over the books I've read this year, I can see that quite a few are what you might call "science fiction" (or "speculative fiction" as some people prefer, but I think that all fiction is speculative really).

The Forever War is proper science fiction, because the plot relies on inventions not yet around in our world (eg time-travelling spaceships). It was written in 1974 and envisions a world between 1996 and 3143 AD with the same soldier protagonist fighting in the same pointless war for all that time. Joe Haldeman, as well as being a professor of creative writing at MIT, is also a Vietnam veteran, so it doesn't take a great leap of the imagination to see which war he is really writing about.

I found this book on Sarah's shelf while borrowing her bedroom floor to lay out my quilting project. It was coming up to the WW1 Armistice centenary so it seemed a good time to read it. I wasn't disappointed. There was even a love story running through it :-)

I'm still waiting for my copy of  "I am I am I am" to arrive, so will have to choose another book from my shelves for tomorrow's train journey - I'm off to Edinburgh to visit Luke :-)