[Simon]

Jim, MeatPounder, Cleo -- may you never thirst.

Cleo - all day at the computer has done the same to me, I used to devour about a book a day but now when I'm done reading and writing at the screens all day, I don't feel like doing the work of reading. I want entertainment that doesn't require me to do the imagining.

UW - I read a lot of science-fiction when I was very young, kind of cowboys and indians in space kinds of things. But I eventually found the dividing like and stepped over into 'spec-fic' or speculative fiction. There's a big yawning divide between the two for many readers.

Orwell's 1984 and Bradbury's Farenheit 451 are called sci-fi by some, but they're really examples of spec-fic. Many include Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 in the top 50 sci-fi books, but it's more spec-fic too.

Anyone else here remember the great old Ace Doubles? Two books in one, two covers, you turned it over to read the other story.



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"If the Holy Bible was printed as an Ace Double", an editor once remarked, "it would be cut down to two 20,000-word halves with the Old Testament retitled as ‘Master of Chaos’ and the New Testament as ‘The Thing With Three Souls.’" – Charles McGrath, New York Times