Fiction about science

Okay, so I've been talking a lot about science fiction. I have to confess that I wasn't thinking too much about SF before I went to ORYCON in November--I hadn't written any science fiction since a misbegotten novelling attempt when I was ten. That was the zenith of my SF phase, the years I devoured most of Heinlein's production (how I missed Starship Troopers, I will never know) and everything else that featured people in outer space. In fact, now that I think back, that novel I started was pretty heavily influenced by Tuf Voyaging, a hunk of fun from George R. R. Martin. I might just have to re-read it.

But I digress.

One of the big reasons I stopped writing science fiction is that for a brief time in my life I was obsessed with science. Real science. I even started college as a chemistry major, and I got into philosophy via (you see this coming, don't you?) philosophy of science. If my kiddo hadn't shown up, I had planned to continue my journey along the edges of science by pursuing a degree in philosophy of the mind, a misbegotten child of science and daydreaming if ever there was one.

And now I've circled all the way around to what prompted my love of science and I'm writing a middle grade science fiction novel. Soft science fiction, not space opera. But it's set in the future, and there is science. Good enough for me.

Of course, the other day I found myself daydreaming about a project set in a fantasy universe inspired by Plato's Timaeus, which just goes to show that once a philosopher, always a philosopher--the writing style just gets a lot less academic.