The Future, The Past (Part Three: The Future--Literature).

Time now for part two of the blog dealing with science fiction. This time, I will talk about the literature that has captured my imagination, and the writers responsible for its creation. The picture above is just to get all of you in the mood to get a little spacy with me for a little bit.

Before I talk about the novel that remains my all-time favorite work of fiction, and the novel that changed my life, I have to mention a book that I first saw either in the late 1960s or early 1970s—I cannot recall for sure, though I know that the book itself was released in September of 1969, two months after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first two men to step foot on the Moon. I saw it at a gas station between the towns of Rosiclare and Elizabethtown, Illinois. Back then, it was a Gulf station, and the Gulf Oil Company released a coffee-table book entitled WE CAME IN PEACE, which commemorated not only the first manned moon landing, but also the history leading up to it. I was just a little kid when I first saw it there in the gas station, but for reasons I cannot to this day properly explain, I knew I wanted it. I vaguely remember leaving the gas station in the car with my mom and dad, and crying and begging them to go back to the station and buy this book for me. It worked. They turned around and bought the book for me. Like I said, I don’t know why I had this craving for this book with the astronaut on the front cover, but something about it fascinated me enough to resort to throwing a fit to get it. I seriously doubt such behavior would work for me in the present, as I near fifty. Would not look good at all. But I was fascinated with men going to the moon. My parents even bought models for me of the Saturn V rocket and the lunar lander, and I believe the command module as well. But all this proves that, whatever the underlying reason, my head was in space. Still is, after all these years. (By the way, a little side note. I just saw today a commercial on You Tube from 1969, about this book, with Rod Serling. I had never seen it before and was a great kick.)

In between that and my first encounter with the novel that changed everything, I watched a lot of science fiction on television, which I talked about in detail in the previous blog. I remember being interested in books during that period, but they were mostly books about sports that I’d check out of the school library. Nothing fictional, except for the occasional Dr. Seuss book.

Then, in December of 1979, that changed forever. And, ironically, it was a book about the destruction of books.

Back then, I was in the eighth grade. One of my teachers was a wonderful man named Charles Cox. He taught science, as well as literature. One of the short stories in our literature textbook was “The Drummer Boy of Shiloh” by Ray Bradbury. I learned that Bradbury was mainly a writer of science fiction and fantasy. And in our school library, there was this one particular book of his called FAHRENHEIT 451. It was set in a world where firemen, instead of putting out fires, started them instead. In particular, they burned books. I read this book over Christmas vacation. I remember being utterly shocked by the language in the book. I mean, there were words like “hell” and “damn” and even “goddamn.” My young fourteen-year-old mind was blown away that they would even allow such a book in a junior high school library, of all places! I cringe at the thought of how naive I was back then. I remember seeing a Harold Robbins novel for the first time not long after reading FAHRENHEIT 451. Compared to that, the foul language of that book looks like a Disney film compared to the raunchiness of a Robbins book. But what caught my attention most of all, what stays with me to this day, are the futuristic images in that book (I especially loved the Mechanical Hound, a robotic dog with the ability to kill), and the poetic way Bradbury had of describing those images. Those images will be fresh in my mind until I cease to exist. There was definitely no writer quite like Bradbury.

Not long after reading FAHRENHEIT 451, I bought the newly released THE STORIES OF RAY BRADBURY, which was a massive collection of one-hundred of his short stories. Still have the original book from back then, sans the dust cover, which wore out. The book itself is nearly just as worn. I’ve had to glue the spine just to keep it from falling apart. Someday, I will buy a newer version, if I can find it. I read THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES and his fantastic, though scientifically inaccurate images, of Mars. I read DANDELION WINE, even though it is not science fiction but much more in the realm of fantasy (Bradbury wrote much more fantasy than he did science fiction, and even the science fiction is closer to what one would define as fantasy, in that he didn’t try to be scientifically accurate). That novel, set in the 1920s, recounts the magical summer of a young boy and his friends. One of the reasons why I love that book is because I always tend to think of my childhood as a magical time, a time when everything was new, when everything was less complex. I read SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES, one of the best dark fantasy books ever written, a book also about a boy’s childhood, but with more sinister doings going on.

There was another book I read not long after FAHRENHEIT 451 that actually had a more direct effect on my decision to want to be a writer. And oddly enough, it was the movie tie-in novelization of STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE, written by Gene Roddenberry. Back then, I would love to read the movie tie-in novelizations of science fiction movies. I remember reading not only STAR TREK, but also ALIEN, OUTLAND, STAR WARS, THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, and RETURN OF THE JEDI. I remember reading the tie-in to RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK too. But it was when I was reading the STAR TREK book when the thought first crossed my mind that maybe I would like to try this someday.

In the spring of 1980 when I was about to graduate 8th grade, I found another book in my school library that caught my attention. It was a thin anthology of novellas called CHAINS OF THE SEA, edited by a man named Robert Silverberg, who would unbeknownst to me at the time become one of my favorite science fiction authors. The cover (as you can see below) was freaky. And the three stories were freaky as well. All three were by authors who were just relatively new to the science fiction publishing and writing game when the book was released back in the early Seventies. I loved all three stories, but my favorite one had to be the title story by Gardner Dozois (pronounced Do-zwah). It has both one of my favorite opening sentences (“One day the aliens landed, just as everyone always said they would.”) and final sentences (“A little while later, they finished winding down the world.”) In between is a gripping story of a troubled young boy who discovers what these visitors to our planet are truly up to, but too late to do the rest of us any good. It is still maybe one of my three favorite short stories in any genre of all time.

Even though I had been introduced to the science fiction literature world by FAHRENHEIT 451 and CHAINS OF THE SEA, another book threw the doors wide open for me, showing me a much larger world that I wanted to explore. It was a coffee table book called ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SCIENCE FICITON. It was published in Great Britain, and through words and lots of pictures told the history of science fiction, in both literature and visual arts, up to the late Seventies. I still have that book, loose pages detached from the spine, also without its dust cover. I would see books mentioned in this encyclopedia and have my imagination stimulated, just by hearing the titles or reading their descriptions. Over the past thirty years or so, I’ve been finding and reading these books, and for the most part never disappointed.

Between 1981 and probably around 1984 or 1985, I bought OMNI magazine from my local Walmart in Harrisburg, IL. Those of you who don’t know, OMNI was a monthly magazine devoted to both science fact and science fiction, published by Bob Guccione (Yes, that Bob Guccione, the one who also gave the world Penthouse magazine and who happened to pass away on October 20, 2010, my 45th birthday). The issue you see below was the first one I ever bought, and it was because it featured a short story by Ray Bradbury, called “Colonel Stonesteel’s Genuine Home-made Truly Egyptian Mummy.” But there was another short story in that issue, but I didn’t read it for another six years or so. It was by this guy I had never heard of, and I figured, why bother? Well, when he went on to publish a novel called NEUROMANCER, a book that turned out to be one of the most talked about and popular science fiction novels of the last thirty years, then two more wonderful, mind-bending novels set in the same universe, COUNT ZERO and MONA LISA OVERDRIVE, then I thought maybe I’d go back to that old OMNI issue and read this story by a guy named William Gibson. The story was called “Johnny Mnemonic,” and it went on to be made into a movie starring Keanu Reeves, pre-Matrix.

Between December of 1979 when I first read FAHRENHEIT 451 for the first time and say the end of 1981, my reading was sporadic. I remember joining the Science Fiction Book Club in the summer of 1981 and getting books like the anthologies THE ARBOR HOUSE TREASURY OF MODERN SCIENCE FICTION and THE ARBOR HOUSE TREASURY OF GREAT SCIENCE FICTION SHORT NOVELS. At the end of that year, I ordered a book from the club that I had heard about from the science fiction encyclopedia I was talking about earlier: RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA by Arthur C. Clarke. It was the second novel I had read by Clarke (the first being 2001), and it is still one of my all-time favorites. It is the story of a mysterious spacecraft that enters the solar system, and the subsequent exploration of it by a group of astronauts. Why this stunning book has not been made into a movie yet is in itself stunning. Though Morgan Freeman was trying to get it made, but as far as I know, the idea fell through. Hopefully someday soon someone will make it.

It was in 1982 when I began reading books more frequently. And at that time it was pretty much all science fiction. Books like George Orwell’s 1984 (still one of the most disturbing books I’ve ever read, almost as much if not more so than any horror novel from Stephen King, Peter Straub, or Clive Barker), THE GODS THEMSELVES by Isaac Asimov, GATEWAY and its sequel BEYOND THE BLUE EVENT HORIZION by Frederick Pohl, THE FOREVER WAR by Joe Haldeman, and a book that when it was first published was not necessarily marketed as science fiction, but definitely is, THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN by Michael Crichton.

1983 was pretty much more of the same. Books like THE FOUNTAINS OF PARADISE by Arthur C. Clarke, and not long after that, a Clarke book I had been aching inside to read since I heard that it was being published: the sequel to 2001, 2010: ODYSSEY TWO. I read it in one day, all 288 pages of it, on Saturday, April 2, 1983. All the questions raised by that mysterious, wonderful movie I had seen back in 1977, answered—for the most part. Still has the best book cover ever, in my opinion, by the great artist Michael Whelan.

There were other science fiction books I read that year, like MINDBRIDGE by Joe Haldeman and FOUNDATION’S EDGE by Isaac Asimov (even though this was the fourth Foundation novel, it was the first one that I had read, and I didn’t even read the first three until 2012! Worth the wait, though.) But most of that summer was spent on the books by a guy you’ve probably heard of named Stephen King. I had first read him in 1981 when the paperback of FIRESTARTER came out. That was the first “bestseller” I had ever read. I loved it, but the next book I read, CUJO in 1982, was even better. I could not put that thing down. Then early in 1983, I read CHRISTINE, and then I ordered all the earlier books I had not read up until that time: CARRIE, SALEM’S LOT, THE SHINING, THE STAND, and THE DEAD ZONE. Those last three I read that summer of ’83. They all were great, but the last one I read that summer, THE STAND, was special. If you asked me to rank my all time favorite novels, FAHRENHEIT 451 would be first, and THE STAND second. And of all those King books, THE STAND comes closest to being science fiction than the others, with its story of a super-flu that kills most of the world's population, though of course it has its horror elements as well. THE STAND was the first “big” book I ever read. 817 pages in paperback (with another of my all time favorite book covers, the one in the middle of the picture of the three versions—1978 hardcover, 1980 paperback, and 1990 complete and uncut edition). It was epic, it was scary, it was mystical, and it was awesome. And it took three weeks to read! But it was worth it. Still my favorite King novel to this day, though he hasn’t done too shabbily since then.

Around that same time, I was getting into reading other genres besides science fiction. I was discovering this dude called Tolkien and his books about hobbits and magic rings and wizards. And that led me to Stephen R. Donaldson and more novels of epic fantasy. And reading Stephen King led me to people like Peter Straub, Clive Barker, and Dean Koontz. I was also getting into more realistic fiction, like thrillers and crime novels from people like Robert Ludlum, David Morrell (a man I consider the best writer who should be more popular than he is), Frederick Forsyth, Elmore Leonard, Robert B. Parker, etc. I would still read science fiction, books like Frank Herbert’s DUNE and Carl Sagan’s only work of fiction, CONTACT, but it was getting less frequent as it had been three or four years earlier.

And then came a big book called DHALGREN by Samuel R. Delany. It was originally published in 1974 and was one of those books I saw mentioned in that sci-fi encyclopedia. I bought a copy from a mail-order used bookstore in Maryland that got a lot of my business back then (I think it has since closed, sadly). I started to read it in 1987. This is the first sentence of the novel. And, yes, it is correctly typed:

to wound the autumnal city.

And it ends in this sentence. Also correctly typed:

Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of the halls of vapor of light, beyond the holland and into the hills, I have come to

Yeah. It was going to be one of those experimental novels. All 800 plus pages. A novel that began in mid-sentence, and ended in mid-sentence. To this day I could not tell you exactly what the book is about. It is about this young man who enters this strange city where weird stuff happens. There are several sex scenes in the book, both heterosexual and homosexual (I perhaps should mention that Delany is bi-sexual). It took me two months to read this book and a lot of the time it was difficult. It is to this day the most difficult book, prose style-wise, that I have ever read. I have a love/hate relationship with this book. I understand the genius of it, but wonder why it had to be so damn difficult to read. Delany was one of those writers who was not a “beach read.” He had bigger fish to fry than just to entertain. His work from the 1960s, when he was just in his twenties, is sometimes stunning, sometimes bewildering to the point of utter frustration. But at least I give him his props for trying to do something different. Sometimes it worked for me, sometimes it didn’t. And in DHALGREN, it did both. And it pushed me away from science fiction literature for a while. Slogging through 800 pages of a brilliant, yet frustrating novel, just took too much out of me to want to return to the science fictional universe, at least for a while.

For most of the time since then, my reading has varied from mysteries and thrillers, historical fiction and non-fiction, even “literary” novels from people like Cormac McCarthy and Jhumpa Lahiri. But I still sneak into the world of wonder of science fiction and fantasy, because I have to. Because I want to. Of the two genres, I read more fantasy now than science fiction. And the fantasy genre will be getting its own blog here in the near future. Of the science fiction I read now, most of it is older stuff I have either not read before, or that I did read thirty years ago or so and want to re-read. That material I read strangely out of nostalgia, which seemingly is a strange thing to say about a genre about the future. But the nostalgia is for how writers once saw the future, how they thought our present would turn out. It is interesting to see how much they actually missed. William Gibson has commented on how he envisioned cyberspace in books like NEUROMANCER, but totally not think of the possibility of cell phones. Not many people could have predicted the personal computer, that nearly everyone would seem to have one, and be connected to each other on this thing called the Internet. Most science fiction writers back then thought we would have been on Mars already, and beyond. But in reality we have still in 2015 not sent humans beyond the Moon, and all of our exploration beyond that has been unmanned. I’m still trying to figure out why we ended up where we are, and not where the writers imagined us to be.

There are several writers from the 1970s who I only began reading maybe in the late 1990s and into the new century. One of those was Octavia Butler, who has become one of my top five favorite science fiction writers of all-time. Her stories were accessible, never arty, and about real people in extraordinary circumstances. Her novel KINDRED is a jolting novel about a young black woman from the 1970s who is inexplicably taken back in time to the antebellum South and is forced to become a slave. Her two novels PARABLE OF THE SOWER and PARABLE OF THE TALENTS are about a young black woman in a dystopian near future America who creates a new religion on the concept that “God is change.” She was the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Fellowship, or what is also called the “Genius Grant.” Butler sadly passed away at the young age of 58 of a stroke in 2006.

Another writer who I got into late was this very interesting person named James Tiptree, Jr., who wrote mainly short stories, but whose fiction was dense, dark, quite unlike anything seen before in science fiction. For a few years, Tiptree remained this mysterious figure, never appearing in public, only corresponding by mail with a few fellow writers and fans. Tiptree’s secret finally came out in 1977. This man was actually a woman named Alice Sheldon. The best introduction to Tiptree is her short story collection HER SMOKE ROSE UP FOREVER. There is a terrific biography of her written by Julie Phillips called JAMES TIPTREE, JR: THE DOUBLE LIFE OF ALICE SHELDON that is compelling. Sheldon was a manic depressive, which certainly could be ascertained by reading her stories, and she ended up murdering her invalid husband and then killing herself in 1987, in despair over his illness and her inability to care for him due to her own health issues.

There are only a very few current science fiction writers whose work I try to keep up with. William Gibson is still going strong, publishing his latest novel THE PERIPHERAL late last year and having it become another New York Times Bestseller. Another one is Kim Stanley Robinson. He wrote a trilogy of novels back in the 1990s about the colonization of Mars. He also wrote one of the best alternate history novels ever, THE YEARS OF RICE AND SALT, set in a world where the Black Plague killed nearly 99 percent of Europe, leading to a world where the dominant religions are Islam and Buddism, and where Christianity has become a footnote to history. This novel came out months after the events of September 11, 2001, which made its subject matter even more relevant. He also wrote a great novel in 2012 called 2312, imagining how our world and solar system would be 300 years from now. He wrote a novel set in prehistoric Europe called SHAMAN, which puts anything Jean Auel ever wrote about that time period to shame. His most recent novel, AURORA, is about a starship and its quest to find a new world light years from Earth to colonize. I have not read it yet, but look forward to it. He is not always an easy read (parts of the Mars trilogy are nearly as dense as DHALGREN seemed to be for me) but he is a gifted writer and one of those people who when you hear him talk seems to have the “smartest person in the room” aura about him.

These days, I don’t really have the urge to want to read current science fiction, and that is sad to me. But the reality is, our present world is so science-fictional, why read about it when you’re living it? In a world of instant communication, 24-hour news networks, a computer in nearly every home, cell phones that seemingly do a million other things besides making calls, a social media world when everyone’s opinion is on view for dissection and debate, as well as what they choose to reveal about their personal lives. A politically-correct world when something can be eliminated from public view if it offends, even if it’s a flag, or a wrestler’s legacy on a website after he has been recorded making racist comments. A world where a seemingly small group of terrorists can bring a nation nearly to its knees. If that doesn’t seem like some futuristic world, I don’t know what does.

When I first got the notion that I might want to be a writer someday, I thought that I would write science fiction. But as the years went by, and I became interested in other genres, and as I realized that writing science fiction well is very difficult, I decided that I might want to try and write other forms besides science fiction. I spent years writing a fantasy novel that will most likely remain unpublished in its entirety, though I have a great fondness in my heart for it. Writing it in a trial-and-error method taught me a lot about how to write a good, entertaining novel. Eventually, I decided that my writing style and approach fitted tales of mystery and suspense best, and that is how ASIAN HAZE was born. But my love for science fiction has never totally gone away, and I decided to try writing it in short story form. Most of my efforts in that regard you will see in my upcoming short story collection, NIGHT'S PLUTONIAN SHORE & OTHER STORIES. All the stories are either science fiction or fantasy, and the fantasy tales are sections of that unpublished novel that I thought worthy to see the light of day. I am very proud of this book, because it shows another side to my writing talents, a side that led to another side eventually revealing itself. I can't wait for everyone to see the book's cover, which I absolutely love, and for it to be read when it finally is released, hopefully in September of this year.

Finally, a bridge between the past and the future. I began this blog weeks ago with the intention of sharing the reasoning behind my loves of history and science fiction. My two-part blog became three parts, and much longer than I thought. But let me close this by telling you a little story that happened in the past, but will have its conclusion after my death. In 1976, this country celebrated its Bicentennial. One of the things done to commemorate this was to have a replica of the Liberty Bell travel across the country, along with a time capsule. I was in the fourth grade, and I remember all of us going to the drug store in downtown Rosiclare, IL, where the bell and the time capsule were situated outside. Before we went there, we were told to write out names on a small slip of paper. Those names went into the time capsule. I don’t know how many autographed slips of paper ended up inside that time capsule, but one of them is mine. And on July 4, 2076, the nation’s Tricentennial, when I will be either six feet under decomposing or a heap of ashes inside some loved one's urn, that time capsule will be opened, and one of the things they will find is my name on a small piece of paper, written by a ten-year-old kid who had his head in the stars, and who has pretty much kept it there forty years later.