Out of this World

[Sunday Scribblings this week prompts us with Out of this World. Here are the memories that prompt evoked in me.]



It isn't my fault. I blame my dad. Perhaps I should blame those old department stores instead. Maybe I'll let you decide.

My dad was born and raised in the borough of Brooklyn, in New York City. His parents were educated; both of them were teachers, and they passed to him the love of learning. My dad read everything he could get his hands on.

I never heard stories of my dad having to "do without" when he was a boy, yet they weren't wealthy either. So my dad used the libraries and he was always looking for a bargain. He was in heaven one year when two department stores had a price war, each trying to undercut the sales of the other. Some of the highly-discounted items were novels. Some of them were on an upper shelf in one room of our house 50 years later.

Among the stories my dad read were the works of Mark Twain, H.G. Wells, and Jules Verne. And that may be where it started.

You see, Jules Verne wrote Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. H.G. Wells wrote The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. All were stories of the fantastic, where the imagination soared beyond what was possible. Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is certainly about either time-travel if anything is.

By the time my dad was in medical school, he had been reading "the pulps" for years and was enjoying stories in magazines like Astounding Science Fiction. He was reading science fiction by Robert A. Heinlein and Donald A. Wollheim. And my dad's brother had a college classmate by the name of Isaac Asimov – he was writing science fiction too. My dad kept reading science fiction over the course of decades.

My parents read to me when I was tiny, and I from them I learned to love reading and learning. Books were never a question – I grew up with them all around me. Our living room had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves to one side of the fireplace. When the house was remodeled when I was eight, a small bedroom was turned into a library with shelves lining 3 walls. The two lower shelves on one wall held kids books. I was soon ready to start making my way through the books on the other shelves.

I don't remember what the first science fiction book I read was, but I'm sure my dad gave it to me. It was probably something by Isaac Asimov, and I was hooked. I read what I could find in my dad's collection and in the town library. When browsing in the fiction section, I came across an anthology of Nathanial Hawthorne stories. I wasn't in the habit of reading mid-1800's literature, but two stories in particular stayed with me. The first was called "Rappaccini's Daughter," full of dark fantasy about the effects of a certain plant. The second was "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" in which a group of old men give in to temptation by water from the fountain of youth.

I'm sure my adoration of science fiction was initially fueled by my dad's fondness for it, and perhaps a bit by my mom's dislike. She thought stories about rockets to outer space or aliens or elves were stupid.

But I was not alone. When I was 10 a student teacher read two or three Narnia books to my fifth grade class. One teacher recommended A Wrinkle in Time. In my high school we passed around copies of J.R.R. Tolkien, each of us waiting impatiently for the person ahead of us in line to finish the next book of the Lord of the Rings. When I was a teenage camp counselor a friend suggested I'd like Robert Heinlein and starting with Stranger in a Strange Land, I plowed through many of his books.

And by the time I was in college, I was distinguishing between fantasy and science fiction, but either one might take me to far planets, with or without alien life. And the term "speculative fiction" now covers a lot of sub-genres, many of which I spend time with.

So when my preference for novels leads me to one small corner of the bookstore, when I can't find much to my taste on the bookshelves in the airport terminals, I blame my dad for leading me down this path. And I smile just thinking about it.