Time Suspended Through Reading

As a teenager I read a lot, I never listed what I read.
I mildly regret not writing reviews of it, with which
to train myself in processing the ideas therein.
That leaves me now with a smaller past
to look back on than I might have had. 

I read a lot of science fiction,
partly because it was a popular genre,
partly because they were not Westerns,
partly because they were fantasy,
and lastly for ontological reasons;

I hoped that what I read would take me
as far away from where I lived as possible,

without me taking drugs I couldn't afford,
which might well make me feel more alien.

Often what I read depressed me,
there were too many weapons,
there was too many conquests
by too many macho hetero males
it was all far too American.

For fiction about apparently unknown worlds
what I read also seemed to have borrowed
from the landscapes of The Old Testament.

I wanted flexi-words, flexi-worlds. 

I knew of no women SF authors,
who would give women characters the lead;
Feminism in science fiction was beyond belief,
or beyond male SF publishers imaginations,
just as Feminism was too much for where I lived.

Years later I read Margaret Atwood.
She showed how mutable the world could be
and how in the hands of an imaginative writer
danger and damage lurked in human form.

She released me from the petrified male lead characters,
the unmoved movers who could not adapt in shifting worlds. 

Before I read her I read the parables of Jesus
I came to see those writings as Science Fiction
for his times; there were utopias and dystopias,
based on the reinterpretation of Jewish Law,
and in some examples there were myopias
where Jesus gave to everyone around him in/sight. 

I still don't understand how the apostles
expected the world's end with so much fervour
Is it something for which we are still waiting?

or is it now something that left us behind?

That sense of time suspended
seems to be a proper Sci Fi ending.....