an enormous ballon filled with helium

A much loved professor of mine once told me that almost everybody in his Tamil Brahmin family grew up to be a scientist and so he decided to be a social scientist, and when people asked what did he research within social science, he said "Scientists." He turned out to be a Science Studies scholar studying scientists. I want to hold on to this account and build an analogy with something that recently happened with a set of novels I bought. At a book sales here at Santa Barbara, I purchased four sci-fi novels - the list was almost a refresher course in sci-fi with Le Guin, Clarke, Banks and Bradbury paperbacks thrown in together with McEwan's novel Enduring Love.I started reading the first chapter of each of them. Here I was trying to re-read the science fiction canon and falling in love with McEwan's novel which actually is about a science fiction writer.

Enduring Love, among McEwan's novels, redoubtably has the most compelling opening and along with the openings in Raj Kamal Jha'sThe Blue Bedspread, Kiran Nagarkar's Sat Sakkam Trechalis, Garcia Marquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch, and Rosalind Belben's Choosing Spectacles, has been one that has for those ten minutes spent reading, made me loose myself completely in the text. Each of the openings of the novels mentioned also do share a common trait which makes me a bit wary about my choice - they are (with the possible exception of Belben's sinuous prose) emphatically visual and endearingly cinematic. Not surprisngly therefore one often sees McEwan's novels being adapted for movies. The nagging question (often talked about), which is almost a conundrum is whether the all-pervasive cinema, screen and television presence around us, has fundamentally molded the way we read novels and ostensibly shaped the way novels are written today. If this question has bothered you, the only balm I could offer is reproducing a few lines from the quietest of stylist McEwan's prose --

"What we were running toward? I don't think any of us would ever know fully. But superficially the answer was a ballon. Not the nominal space that encloses a cartoon character's speech or thought, or, by analogy, the kind that's driven by mere hot air. It was an enormous ballon filled with helium, that elemental gas forged from hydrogen in the nuclear furnace of the stars, first step along the way in the generation of multiplicity and variety of matter in the universe, including our selves and all our thoughts" (p.3)