Dr Karl Kruszelnicki is one of
Australia’s most popular authors and
communicators on science. He is also the
Julius Sumner Miller Fellow at the
University of Sydney. His latest book is
Game of Knowns, published by Pan
Macmillan.
What kind of books did you enjoy reading when
you were growing up?
When I was growing up, mostly science-fiction,
overwhelmingly science-fiction. I started off at the
Wollongong library, reading my way through
everything. I loved reading – and very rapidly I got
into reading all of the fairy tales of the world:
Norwegian, Danish, Japanese, Arabic, Russian fairy
tales – the Wollongong library had a big section on
that. I was amazed by how similar they all were –
and from that I then moved into reading science-
couple of hours a day just to read for fun, so I
stopped doing it – and only recently have I started
reading science-fiction again.
Do you have any favourite science-fiction
authors?
fiction, which I started doing when I was about ten. I
read science-fiction books at a rate of one book per
day from when I was about 14 to when I was 32...
and then when I was 32 I started studying for
medicine, and the body of knowledge that I had to
absorb was so great that I could no longer afford a
I like space opera – Alastair Reynolds, for example,
and of course all the old ones, but of the new ones, I
like Alastair Reynolds. He does sub-light space
opera: the human race is limited to travelling slower
than the speed of light, gradually drifting their way