Heres a lovely speech from Neil Gaiman about the importance of libraries and reading. Hes pounding the same drum that I often do, that the key skill to our survival as a species is empathy, and reading is the best way to develop that. But he comes at it from some different angles, and Ill probably be quoting him in the future. Heres a particularly fascinating passage, not precisely about empathy but the skills that reading SF/F generate: I was in China in 2007, at the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed? Its simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls. Full speech at the link: theguardian/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming
Posted on: Thu, 07 Nov 2013 02:25:46 +0000
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