When he was sixteen, my father visited the World of Tomorrow.
It was a grand and glorious place, a shining white city that revealed the glories that science would bring to transportation, to communications, to the average American home. Dishwashers, flying cars, nylon fabrics and fluorescent lights, cameras that took color pictures, robots to do the chores, even glorious Smell-O-Vision that would bring scent as well as sight and sound to the movies - all were there for anyone to experience and enjoy.
And if there weren't enough, there was magnificent art, tasty food, groundbreaking transportation, exotic animals and an original copy of the Magna Carta, even a midway with bizarre acts like "The Frozen Alive Girl" and a building full of strange art and stranger people designed by Salvador Dali himself. Superman, the last son of Krypton himself, visited Frank Buck's Jungleland and Elsie the Cow, Johnny Weismuller and Eleanor Holm performed at Billy Rose's Aquacade accompanied by a full orchestra....
Is is any wonder that Dad took his camera and snapped picture after picture? That he rode the escalator that circled the great circular building that became the symbol of this place of wonders? Or that he came away with a love for the future and for technology that lasted the rest of his life?
Did I mention that all this magnificence was built on the remains of an ash pile in Flushing, Queens?
By now you've probably figured out that Dad's great leap forward has gone down in history as the 1939 New York World's Fair. This combination technology fair, amusement park, advertisement for American products, and showcase for the greatness of the past and the presumed greatness of the future was originally intended as a moneymaker to lift New York and the United States out of the economic malaise of the Great Depression.
It failed at that - the Fair lost money despite running two years and attracting 44 million visitors, including my father and his parents - but its influence on later literature and popular culture has been enormous, and deliberately so. Not only did the Fair's organizers deliberately court comics publisher DC by inviting Superman actor Ray Middleton to appear on July 4, 1940, they teamed up with magazine publisher Street & Smith to incorporate the World's Fair into its popular Doc Savage adventure magazines, while New Yorker writer E.B. White wrote one of his marvelous essays about the Fair in 1939. It's little wonder that New York science fiction fans, entranced by the goings-on in Flushing they decided to hold a what was later proclaimed the first ever science fiction convention, NYCON, in the summer of 1939, or that literature and art ranging from episodes of cartoon series Pinky and the Brain to Pulitzer Prize winner The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay have been set at the Fair, or that Marvel Comics has set two of its recent movies at the fairgrounds.
My father would have been delighted. Dad, raised in an upper middle class family in Edgewood, a tiny borough a few miles from downtown Pittsburgh, had loved technology from the get-go. Not only was he an enthusiastic and skilled amateur photographer, he had a ham radio license from an early age. He took his camera off to war, and in addition to snapping the usual tourist pictures of Arles, Nimes, and Hitler's bathtub, he shot several beautifully composed pictures of the structure of the Eiffel Tower during a leave in the newly liberated French capital. He later went on to build his own hi-fi stereo during the 1950s, subscribed to the Heath Kits catalog for years, and was working on building his own computer when he died of a heart attack in 1975.
With interests like these, it's little wonder Dad loved science fiction in all its forms. I don't know if he read the pulps like Astounding and Amazing, but he was familiar enough with the SF subculture that he was planning to go to Worldcon in Pittsburgh in 1960 until Mum suffered complications delivering me a few weeks earlier and needed him at home. Our family had a subscription to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, we never missed an episode of shows like The Avengers, The Wild Wild West, or Batman, and of course Dad was a fan of Star Trek from 1966 on. I have no idea if he collected comics as a boy, but I do know that Dad gifted me with issues of DC books like Green Lantern and The Legion of Superheroes when I was small, so it's more than likely.
I first discovered the literature my father loved in my early teens, thanks to reruns of Star Trek. Dad was thrilled, of course, and made sure that I had a steady supply of SF classics. He passed long before I became an active fan, but when I went to my first Worldcon in 1980 my mother's pride was tempered by wistfulness that I was able to do what Dad never could. I'm sure he would have been pleased and proud that I've been a panelist, concom member, fan writer, and college SF club founder, and my only wish is that he could have lived enough to see the fruit that sprang from the seeds planted by his love of the literature of ideas.
Here are some of the books that I read in those long-gone and halcyon days of yore, when Dad was alive and encouraging me to sample all the science fiction I could lay my grubby little paws on. If the list is heavily weighted toward works by men instead of women, well, that was during the bad old days in the early to mid-1970s when aside from Ursula LeGuin and Anne McCaffey, there weren't all that many women actually writing SF and fantasy. Lois Bujold and Jacqueline Lichtenberg were still writing Star Trek fanfiction, Vonda McIntyre was best known for short stories, and Diane Duane and Lynne Flewelling were still, respectively, either working on their first book or in high school.
That said, here are the SF novels and collections I read while Dad was still alive to look on and beam approvingly. Some of these were his favorites, too, while others I discovered on my own. However, I like to think that he would have been delighted that, forty years later, his little girl was still reading the literature he loved, and making her own small contributions as writer and critic:
The Demolished Man, by Alfred Bester - – this dazzling novel was featured in one of Quarkstomper's Sunday night diaries a ways back, and justly so. One of the first SF novels that combined the tight plot of a classic mystery with the razzle-dazzle futurism of the pulps, The Demolished Man is, at core, the classic conflict between order and chaos, good and evil, and a balanced society versus individualism run amok. Lincoln Powell, top cop in a future New York with a small but elite population of telepaths, is determined to stop Ben Reich, murderer of businessman Cray D'Courtney, before Reich can kill again. Add in Powell's growing feelings for D'Courtney's traumatized daughter Barbara, the near-certainty that Reich has the potential to become one of the Great Men who simultaneously shape and destroy society, brilliant, pyrotechnic prose, and one of the most fully realized depictions of a potential future in post-war SF, and it's no wonder that The Demolished Man not only wowed me when I was thirteen, it's still one of those books I can read today with pleasure, excitement, and the sure knowledge that I will see something new no matter how many times I pick it up.
Deathbird Stories, by Harlan Ellison - Harlan Ellison is one of my favorite short story writers and essayists. Yes, he's a curmudgeon, yes, there was that appalling incident with Connie Willis a few years ago, and yes, he can (and all too often does) go over the top. But the stories in this volume, all written when Ellison was still relatively young, are some of the most brilliant, beautifully written, thoughtful works of American fiction I've ever read...and yes, I do include mainstream short story writers. The title story in particular, an aching, beautiful meditation on divinity, loss, and love at the end of the world cleverly disguised as a non-linear short about Everyman Nathan Stack, was the first work I'd ever read that pointed out the contradictions inherent in the Book of Genesis. My religious views were never the same, and if I am no longer a Christian, it's because of the journey that began in 1973 with this story.
Foundation, by Isaac Asimov - this grand, sweeping story based roughly on Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was one of the very first pieces of science fiction to take history instead of technology as its theme. Originally written as a series of connected stories and novellas, the epic tale of Hari Seldon, the Mule, Bayta Darrell and her descendant Arkady, and the First and Second Foundations dazzled me then despite the occasionally clunky prose and one-dimensional players. Magnifico, both pathetic and powerful, is still one of the best characters in science fiction, and if George Lucas didn't appropriate Trantor wholesale for his technoworld Coruscant, I will gladly rewatch the horror that is The Phantom Menace, Jake Lloyd and all.
The October Country, by Ray Bradbury - Bradbury is best known for The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, and Dandelion Wine, but these brilliant, beautifully written short stories are still some of his best work. Chilling, amusing, and deeply, deeply moving, they can stand beside anything this master of the speculative short story has written. If nothing else, _"Homecoming," about a normal boy adopted into a family of supernatural beings who love him despite what they see as a disability, will haunt you for years to come.
“Timothy...Timothy is afraid of the dark....”
Citizen of the Galaxy, by Robert A. Heinlein – this book, along with almost all of Heinlein's other juveniles, mysteriously appeared on a low shelf in our dining room one fine day in the summer of 1973. I don't recall ever being told directly “these are yours, have fun,” but after a couple of weeks of wondering where they'd come from and what they were doing in the dining room, I cautiously picked up The Rolling Stones and started to read. Needless to say, I was enthralled, and within a month or so I'd read every single one, plus Starship Troopers, most of Heinlein's future history, and Methusaleh's Children, still the only book starring Lazarus Long where he isn't a long-lived and annoying Gary Stu.
I loved them all (especially The Rolling Stones, which still cracks me up forty years later), but the one that actually made me think about citizenship, freedom, and the responsibilities incumbent upon us all was this coming of age story about a boy who begins as a slave, is adopted by a clan of traders, and finally learns his true parentage...only to learn that with knowledge comes power, and the necessity to do what's right rather than what is convenient. It's unusually deep for a children's book, and has an ending that both satisfies and tantalizes.
Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey - one of the books I acquired with my membership to the Science Fiction Book Club was an anthology of stories that had won the Hugo, the annual award given at Worldcon to the best novel, short story, novella, film, etc. The stories, all chosen and introduced by Isaac Asimov, were of uniformly high quality and included gems by the likes of Poul Anderson, Gordon Dickson, Avram Davidson, Harlan Ellison, and Fritz Leiber. I spent many hours reading and enjoying "Allamagoosa," "Gonna Roll the Bones," "Soldier, Ask Not," and many, many others, and if some of the more adult references went straight over my head, well, I was only fourteen.
And then there was "Weyr Search."
From the very first line - "Less woke, cold" - I was entranced. Lessa, the powerful, bitter girl bent on vengeance for her murdered family…F'lar, the noble dragonrider she chooses as her weapon against the warlord Fax, only to have F'lar choose her in turn to nurture the only female dragon capable of laying eggs…F'lar's brother F'nor…noble Lady Gemma, doomed by the child she carries…the dragons, bronze and brown and gleaming gold…oh, this was heady stuff. The novella was the very first story by a woman to win a Hugo, and when I found the novel that McCaffrey had created from "Weyr Search" and its sequels, I was hooked. I was less pleased with some of the sequels (the trilogy about Menolly was wonderful, but I never understood the appeal of The White Dragon), and never liked the sexual politics of Dragonquest, but the delight I took in finding a science fiction novel written by a woman, starring a woman, where the salvation of the planet comes through a woman, will remain with me to the day I die.
Pilgrimage: The Book of the People, by Zenna Henderson - as with McCaffrey, I first encountered Henderson's work in an anthology. Unlike the action and adventure of McCaffrey's dragons, "Gilead" was the quiet, aching story of Peter and Bethie, the half-human, half-alien children of an Earthling and an exiled member of a race of psychics. The People, gentle and wise, had been forced to flee their home when a catastrophe destroyed their planet, and instead of finding succor on Earth, had met with nothing but scorn and terror. Peter, who could fly but quickly learned to conceal his heritage to get along, was the narrator, but the heart of the story was Bethie, born to ease the pain of others but unable to make the final step that would keep the agony from destroying her own mind. That these children of two words eventually found their mother's People did not lessen their suffering, and Peter's refusal to yield completely at the end of the story haunts me still.
Later I found other stories by Henderson, collected primarily in this and The People: No Different Flesh. All are excellent, but two in particular have stuck with me: "Pottage," about a group of the People who have done their best to suppress their gifts to stay alive in a hostile world, and "Angels Unawares," where a pioneer couple adopt an orphaned girl of the People whose family was wiped out for sorcery by fundamentalists. My mother taught "Pottage" for years in her classes, and it never failed to have an impact on her students.
%%%%%
And so - this some of the science fiction that shaped my life when I was young. What are your favorites? The Stars My Destination? Killashandra? Dreamsnake? Lord Valentine's Castle? The Snow Queen? Come gather 'round the dilithium crystals and share....
%%%%%
Readers & Book Lovers Series Schedule