Science Fiction Memories

Catching up ... Nixguy posted recently about Robert A. Heinlein - it would have been his hundredth birthday. It's impossible to think of science fiction without him - and Clarke, and Asimov - those three dominated the era between the 50s and the 70s. Their speculations were just as often about our social future as they were adventures with spaceships. And Heinlein especially, with the sexual revolution (Stranger In A Strange Land) and the Vietnam war (Starship Troopers) - although the stories were never intended to be perfect metaphors.

Honestly, I never dug too deeply into the Heinlein bookshelf besides those two classics - although if I recall correctly, I also read Friday when I was about 15, for no other reason than the cover artwork. (C'mon. I was fifteen.)

My mother remarried when I was a child, and my stepfather moved in with, among other things, a very large library of science fiction - almost everything that had been published through the early 80s. They were mostly trade paperbacks, and no matter how serious the subject matter the blurb on the back cover was filled with hyperbole (Take a wild ride through a doorway in time! A planet where death lurks around every corner!) and the front cover was a trippy, psychedelic painting that had little connection with the story. Long were the hours I spent, in summertime, plowing through those novels - Andre Norton and Arthur C. Clarke almost in their totality, but a sampling of others along the way. I read in my room, on the beach, in the back yard, and always in the back-back seat of the family station wagon, on our long drives to vacation places in New England.

Soon, though, I had so much required school reading that my time for science fiction was less and less. And even before that my mother, a great lover of English literature and one of the best-read people I know - had instilled in me an interest in books in general. The juvenile canon soon took up my time: Salinger, Golding, Knowles, Steinbeck, and so forth. Soon enough I had to slog through Great Expectations before school resumed in August. It was brutal. And Dickens remains one of the very few classic authors I ultimately never learned to like.

These days about every 6th or 7th book I read is sci-fi or some kind of speculative fiction - always Vernor Vinge, the cyberpunk writers, some Gaiman, J.G. Ballard - and more often in the summer, maybe because of the habits of yesteryear. And getting back around to Heinlein, in honor of the centennial, I will add The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress to queue, and maybe take it with me on our yearly trip to Maine.

I've been meaning to read it since the early 80s ...