This aside, things are actually looking up. The insomnia's largely vanished, I'm studying again (even the statistics stuff which I used to avoid like a plague rat), and I have a large amount of new reading material which is great since Ive been limited to pretty much the same 20 books or so I took with me to oxford last year. The library near me is the borough central library and has actually got a decent selection, including the engineering section. Its a refreshing change to actually find some degree level books for loan instead of a "Hey kids, this is engineering, honest!" type bookshelf that many other libraries have.
Ive gone on a major sci/speculative fic kick, getting a couple of HG Wells (The Sleeper Awakes, The Invisible Man), Banks (Look to Windward) and Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse Five). I thought I'd branch a bit to the origins of scifi; since up till now I've been quite content with more recent books that generally take a lot for granted.
Especially since the early 80's, scifi has been virtually mainstream.You've got the star wars films bringing the genre to a massive audience, then the terminator films, blade runner, back to the future, the massive run of star trek films, the matrix, equilibrium, and countless others.
When I say that books (& films) take a lot for granted I mean that because of this cultural penetration a lot of science fiction is standardised, or variations on a theme. Say as a basic starter: you've got your basic space opera. Straight away due to narrative pacing you're going to have some form of faster-than-light travel (warp speed/hyperjump/stargate/folding/slipstream) to get the ships from point A to point B in a reasonable narrative timeframe. Its space opera, so there's going to be standard weapons (laser [and variants like phaser,etc]/railguns, plasma guns of varying descriptions), faster than light communications (ansibles, as a generic term) and if you've got a particularly weak writer (like star trek seems to have had a dearth of in the 80's/90's) a definite case of "particle of the week" problem/conflict/resolution arc.
This standardisation is, I guess, to be expected as market forces take hold. After the pioneers of each genre you're bound to get people leaping on the bandwagon (not that that's necessarily a bad thing) supplying a demand for more of the same kind of stuff started by the pioneers. This spate of book borrowing is really trying to get back to the original font of it all, and you can argue very convincingly that HG Wells is one of fathers of an entire genre.
Here's the thing: its fresh. Its written in a manner as to conjure images of exactly what the author was thinking of, because of course back then there was no precedent for what an alien should look like or simply just trying to describe a style of architecture. Its fantastically free, original, and delightfully phrased in the language of the rump of victorian era trying to make sense of a world, or worlds, that could exist according to the somewhat flawed science of the time.
But here's the thing that blows my mind, and makes me love the genre even more.
Wells was writing fairly prolifically for most of his lifetime, from 1895 to 1946 when he died. This man wrote the first arguably reasonable descriptions of a Maser (type of laser, for those not of a scientific bent).
War of the Worlds, 1898
"Forthwith flashes of actual flame, a bright glare leaping from one to another, sprang from the scattered group of men. It was as if some invisible jet impinged upon them and flashed into white flame. It was as if each man were suddenly and momentarily turned to fire."
The first maser was created in the fifties. He actually wrote this thing before fucking Einstein theorised about stimulated emission in 1917, and five decades before someone actually thought of using this principle to create a laser.
The blitz during world war 2, submarine launched ballistic missiles, unrestricted warfare (gas, biological weapons, killing civilians), all this and more was written about years before it actually happened.
This is the kind of scifi/speculative stuff that everyone should have read, or have in their library, the entire point of the genre to act as a shoehorn for the mind so that when you put the book down you have a sensation of "holy fuck!" , and especially because of the things that he wrote in an era where the genre didn't exist, to write with such foresight blows my fucking mind wide open.