When I was a teenager, I was the only person I ever met who obsessively read science and science fiction. I didn’t meet anyone else with the same tastes until I went to college and even there the number of folk was pretty small.
Growing older, I have run into a cadre of people with similar influences through books, literature and the web. It seems clear, for instance, that most of the readership of Slashdot had similar influences when they were growing up.
The best one that I’ve seen recently is Paul Krugman, this year’s Nobel Prize winner in Economics. When asked by PBS interviewer Jim Leher why he got interested in economics, Krugman said it was because of an Isaac Asimov book he read as a youngster. He wanted to be the psychohistorian Hari Seldon from the Foundation series and, since there is no psychohistory, economics was as close as he could get.
Even if I don’t personally contribute to the world in the ways I imagined years ago, it is thoroughly gratifying to see people with the same influences shaping the world around us. This is my time. And I’m so damn happy about it.
The Foundation series may be headed to the movies. I think it would be great fun …