But I didn’t grow up in the Golden Age of the ’30s and ’40s. When I was a child, as suffused as popular cultural depictions of SF still were (and continue to be) with spacefaring imagery, other themes, speculations, and what-ifs had begun crowding in at the edges. In fact, as a voracious and omnivorous upper-elementary reader, I read an enormous amount of juvenile science fiction without ever taking my adventures off-planet.

Instead there were contemporary riffs on Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World, and many, many deep sea adventures.

For those keeping track, it’s just about one year since my first time writing for the fine folks at the Canadian Science Fiction Review, and though my debut was an essay on Heinlein, I hadn’t returned to the form again before today. (Though my book coverage may have sometimes landed somewhere between a full-blown essay and straightforward review.)

There’s more upcoming. I’ll keep you posted.