What I Love and Hate when it comes to Classic Sci-Fi | The Modern Hidalgo

Arthur C. Clarke, Foundation, Bargain Books, etc.

THE MODERN HIDALGO: Entry_025
Written: Friday. August 2, 2019.

Once again, I wasn’t able to produce a journal entry yesterday. I had to do an overnight stay in the hospital room of my dad. And he’s still not gonna be able to go home just yet. There’s some stuff in his system that’s not quite right yet. The doctors insist on making him stay some more days. This would be the second time he had been declined of going home. Too bad for him. Too bad for us too, because we’re affected by it as well.

As long as he’s there, me and my brother have to go back and forth from the hospital to our house. We do alternate rounds. I stay one night there, the next day, my brother stays one night there, and then the cycle continues.

Only today, both of us are at home. Which sucks, because I had a lot of things planned out in my head for my alone time in the house tonight. But because of my brother’s presence, I wasn’t gonna be able to do some of the things I planned out to do.

So I did something else.

I went out of the house. I told my brother, before heading out, that I was going out…yeah that’s just what I said to him. Nothing else. I mean, it’s not like I was lying. I was telling the truth. Just the partial truth. The only information that was needed to be known.

I went to Fishermall. Of course I’d go to Fishermall, when I have all this time for myself. Plus, I was just itching to get away from the hospital. Nothing to do there but to binge-read (if such a term is actually used the same as binge-watching) 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Yes, there’s a book version of the greatest of all time sci-fi movie. It was written simultaneously with the shooting of the movie. I feel like I’ve said this before. Oh yeah, I have. In my previous journal entry.

I’m halfway finished on reading the book. I must say, it’s a very interesting book. Almost daunting at times. Because there are some parts that really deal with the theme of man’s place in the universe. Such things really get inside your psyche, that you too start to question the validity of your existence. I swear, this shit is scarier than horror movies. Cause there’s just something about it that you know is fact. You know that in some twisted way, what you’re reading is a true perspective of what reality actually is.

This book questions a lot of things, all pertaining to humanity and how it came to be, and what it could be in the future. And our eternal struggle to evolve to our truest selves, because we ourselves can’t comprehend the idea of it; that we tend to fall back into barbarism.

I like it when books let me think. It’s not so often that I get to dabble with questioning my own purpose in this world. Such thoughts can be quite harmful to me if I get too carried away with thinking about it. I might just lose my mind whilst believing that I’m still sane.

Though the book has some faults. One in particular is how the author spends a lot of time talking about mundane things. Such as how the main character gets to one place to the other, where they are currently in, every single nook and cranny of whatever room the scene is in as you’re reading. The book in itself is a juxtaposition of grand scale ideas, and the boring everyday stuff we see around us, told in the Arthur C. Clarke way.

Take what I said however you want to take it. Even I don’t know what it meant.

If this book proves to be great, then it would be the second old classic science fiction novel that I was able to appreciate. Cause I’ve disliked three old sci-fi books already in my library. Those being The Legion of Space, Stranger in a Strange Land, and Foundation.

Two of those titles you might know of. But all of them were written 40–50 years ago. Which makes them all old classics.

There’s just something about old sci-fi, or just old books, that you either love it for how it is written, or hate it, for how it is written.

Cause most of my troubles when it comes to old books is how different it is from modern literature. The older books were written in the focus of the plot, detail, and the constant use of big words that you have to be holding a dictionary with you just in case you’ve encountered a wild word pokemon…

The newer books are more focused on character pieces, dialogue, interactions of one character towards the other. While still maintaining a level of plot.

I dunno. I guess it’s just really gonna be like that for new-age thinkers like you and me. If, of course, you’re also a 21 year old or a year older or younger, such as myself.

But that’s not to say that the old stories are bad. It’s just that we have to accept that some would get antiquated with the context of what they were telling, that most of the readers in the future would really have a hard time of reading them.

Take Dracula, for instance. I really wanted to like the book, but it was just too damn long, and most of what was inside the book were not really anything at all about the titular character, who is Dracula.

Who is Dracula? Honestly. I spent more time rolling my eyes over Van Helsing’s too-long-to-read monologues, than actually reading about Dracula. Sure, Van is describing the horror that is Count Dracula, an impossible creature of the dark who sucks out blood from its victims as a way to survive. But nah, Van’s just a crazy son of a bitch.

Word of the Day: Younker.

• a fashionable, or inexperienced, young man.

I realized that I literally changed the course of the story, after “I went to Fishermall”.

Basically, I went there to go to Chapters & Pages (A second-hand bookstore) to look for some books. And then I lucked out, and found Crossroads of Twilight, the 10th book in the Wheel of Time series by author Robert Jordan.

After spending like an hour of looking through books in the Bargain Books section, which all cost 8 pesos, I found Crossroads in the 45 pesos section.

I wasn’t even expecting to see it today. Lucky….

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