Wow, do you have a TV now?

I love your ingenuity with the vacuum hose. I would have never thought of that. It sounds like you traded a childhood of brain-numbing television watching for a functioning brain.

I loved Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 and 2010 (obviously not as good), I think I read 3001 as well. They were really great, and always struck me as being very serious science fiction, unblinking in its realism (realistic science-fiction... oxymoron?) and somber effort to portray man's relationship with the cosmos.

I don't think I read any C.S. Lewis, I always get him mixed up with Louis Carroll, who I did read.