I've been reading a bunch of 60s/70s sci fi recently - the odd book by the likes of Pohl, Bester, Haldeman, Heinlein, Lem etc... as well as biggies like Arther

I've been reading a bunch of 60s/70s sci fi recently - the odd book by the likes of Pohl, Bester, Haldeman, Heinlein, Lem etc... as well as biggies like Arther C Clarke and Philip K Dick (yet to touch Asimov!). I've been blown away by how enjoyable and fascinating it all is, given how long ago these stories were written. My hunch was that sci fi would date a lot faster than most other genres (and sure, some of the social/cultural/gender aspects seem laughably wrong today), but in the best of these books the human element is so gripping that the sci fi aspect simply becomes a perfectly fantastical backdrop against which to explore some niche part of the human psyche. "The Stars My Destination" really stuck out to me in this sense. Another surprise I had was how much more I've enjoyed the lesser-known authors than the likes of Clarke. I've now gone through both "Rendezvous With Rama" and "The Fountains of Paradise", and whilst the ideas are epic, the actual execution generated very little interest for me. Anyway, that was all very tangential, but your comment really brought home how much further I still need to go to start touching the "source" of sci fi.