My love affair with science fiction (part three)

Let’s go down memory lane and revisit my childhood’s hometown (again) and talk about the disconcerting lack of interest people around me showed in science fiction.

I think my school was a little on the unimaginative side. Everything we read in class was some kind of social realism, and while there is a lot to be said for that, treating all kinds of science fiction, fantasy and speculative fiction as irrelevant is, if you’ll pardon my saying so, just plain idiotic.

Perhaps that was why everyone, including my teachers, was pretty clueless when I wrote a report about the Internet (in 1997 or 1998 I think), and since I did that sort of thing and also wrote my own stories, I was labelled a nerd. Some of the kids actually made fun of me for having my own email address because it was so incredibly geeky … I wonder if they’ve changed their mind since then.

So that was how it was in my backwater hometown. Only one or two other kids in my class watched or read any kind of science fiction. When I dressed up as a character from Star Wars at 15, most of my class mates had no clue whom I was supposed to be. And not because I did a lousy job; They simply had never watched Star Wars.

It did get a better in high school (or the Danish educational system’s equivalent). But I still had to find my spec fic fixes online.

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