The Future of the Past

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Three months ago I came up with resuming a project I started here before the great lockdowns and all the insanity.

I was going to read myself back into my personal history with science fiction.

I see this is going to take my explaining a bit of my own background or how I came to run away with the science fiction and fantasy circus, which is not just a fairly strange pursuit for a woman who was born and raised in a small Portuguese village of no particular importance but outright insane.

You see, where I come from — sonny, (and for that matter, daughtery) — men were men, women were women, and reading was fairly weird. However if you were going to read — and my family was weird enough to — you read things like the newspaper, poetry and if you were of a certain bend of mind and aimed to improve yourself, popular theology, history, and other sciences, more or less in that order. At least that’s what you read if you were a man. If you were a woman you read improving books, edifying tales, and perhaps, hidden and by stealth, true confessions. (Oh, manuals of cooking and handcrafts, too, but that’s another category.) If you came from a family weird enough to read fiction — guilty as charged. Actually my family read everything, including collecting the inserts in medicine bottles. What can I way, the nut didn’t fall far from the tree — normally men read mystery, historic fiction, maybe military fiction, Westerns (for light reading, which they might or might not admit to.) Women read romantic fiction or edifying fiction, such as the lives of saints. (BTW romances in Portugal were more romantic than sexy, but the romantic was more of a 19th century definition. Or as I like to explain it, he died, she mourned him for decades till she died — joining a convent optional — and that was the HEA.)

Of course I read everything. Yes, including the romances that my older cousin read. But part of it is that I continually ran out of reading material. I had entire friendships based on the fact that some kids’ parents signed them up for book clubs and I could borrow the books. In fact, looking back, a lot of my young life was distorted by and devoted to story-seeking-behavior. What the stories were didn’t much matter,and whether they were good was secondary. Honestly? Story is story. Kind of like chocolate is chocolate. Even the worst chocolate (the chocolate of my childhood could be classed as a form of soap) is better, to a kid at least, than no chocolate at all. And frankly, when it comes to story I’m still a kid.

My father tried. I want to point this out right now. My father did his best to teach me good literary taste. He tried to get me to appreciate great books, and have mystery as my guilty pleasure on the side.

It could have worked, maybe. Even if mysteries would have been my primary reading, and the literary stuff just enough to be able to talk about it.

The problem is that my brother went into engineering. When I was eleven, he was an engineering student, and he made friends with a guy who had an actual library. (Something I’d only heard of in movies. In my family we kept books everywhere, including the potato cellar, the workshop and in every other room. Yes, that room too.

Anyway, I listened to the description of the library (yes, it had a ladder) as though he were talking about a fantastical realm, but the most amazing thing is that my brother had discovered science fiction.

For reasons that only the psychiatrist he never had could explain, he decided that he could borrow books — please note, actually bring books into the house I lived in, into the room next to mine — and I wouldn’t read them.

Of course I read them. The first one I remember reading was Out of Their Minds, by Clifford Simak. The first book i remember reading knowing it was science fiction, that is.

It is possible — unless it’s a false memory — that I had read Have Spacesuit Will Travel (Robert A. Heinlein) before, when I was 8. My brother says this was impossible because the first Portuguese edition was when I was 14. And this might be true. Or not. You see, Portugal had the same approach to copyright as many other third world countries. I suspect I stumbled onto it having bought it, in a plain unmarked cover, in some fair, or from some sidewalk bookseller. And that — officially — the edition didn’t exist. The reason I think this happened is that I didn’t have a concept of “science fiction” and didn’t realize the book was anything but contemporary fiction, in 1970. You see, I had seen the moon landing, and I had absolutely no reason to believe that America didn’t have people on the moon permanently. So– I think if I had read HSSWT at 14 I would have realized what it was.

Anyway, i do understand that Out of their minds isn’t precisely science fiction, except perhaps in the that sense where science meets philosophy and ontology. But it was science fiction enough for 11 year old me. At least once my brother had explained that science fiction was dreaming/writing of a future that obviously did not yet exist.

I fell into it with both feet and no parachute. By the time my brother realized I was reading everything he brought home, and told his friend to not lend him any racy stuff, it was already too late. both to stop the addiction and to keep it clean. By then I was taking classes in the city, and had found my way to bookstores that sold more of this particular form of crack.

Oh, heck, who am I kidding? I was back to my old tricks, including carefully cultivating entire relationships because these girls’ fathers or grandfather had stashes of science fiction books around the house. (Some of these men were even nice enough to give me entire boxes of these books as, they say, they’d “outgrown” them. Ah.)

Now what does that have to do with reading myself back through it? Well, you see, most of the books I read — though not all, but the one offs are harder to track and often were never legal — were from the Argonauta collection.

And it’s possible now to find a listing of all the books. See link above.

The problem, when I first tried to do this, is that some books were (as they were by the time I started reading them) unobtanium. But a few months ago, Charlie Martin suggested I might just read the ones I could find.

…. As such, I have read Adrift in the Stratosphere, and will inflict my views of it on you sometime next week. Mostly because I think it’s important to pass on a knowledge of what came before, what worked and what would make us laugh out loud.

Reading what the people of the past thought was the future is fascinating, and also a cautionary tale that what seems absolutely obvious to us is not necessarily so, and the future might prove us wrong.

But more importantly, I’m going to do this, so I might as well share.

I will do these “reviews” — revisits? — once a week on either Tuesdays or Wednesdays.

If you guys find books of the same time that are interesting, and want to suggest them, feel free.

Anyway, we’re off next week with Adrift in the Stratosphere, by A M. Low. If you want to play along.

You obviously don’t have to read it, and I’ll try to make the write-up fun anyway.

So, see you next week.

177 thoughts on “The Future of the Past”

  2. I’m assuming you meant “potato cellar”, because storing books in the “potato seller” gives me a really weird image.

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    2. “Books stored in the Potato seller” = greengrocer with books in his pockets and under each arm… :)

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      1. And here I picture green grocers as members of either the Albertian Order of Liebowitz or as memorizers from Fahrenheit 451.

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        1. Sounds fun. They would be third-order, living in the secular life as the order’s extended network.

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    3. My family were potato sellers five generations back. Our potato cellars were next level.
      As said before, my fingers take dictation from my ears, and it gets weird.

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      1. My biggest problems with typing are putting spaces in the wrong place, spelling “the” “teh”, “from” as “form” and the whole “there/where” thing. I know when to use the correct words but when I type I always just use where or there and then have to go back and correct it the right word.

        Also, I’m really impressed by Grok. It told me exactly what you meant by HEA, and I asked and it told me that rocks do not make good pizza toppings.

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  3. This does sound interesting. I’ll note, as a child for me a story was ranked by how fun it was in the end. My teenage years I discovered OSC, Frank Herbert, Pournelle, and Clancy.

    Part way through Dune books I looked up and said “he is delivering a political exposition / what if.” I also realized that Star Trek was taking issues of today and protecting them on a futurish backdrop.

    Ever since then SciFi was fascinating more because it allowed a situation to be explored than the underlying technologies.

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    1. That is what makes sci-fi cool. Using it to ask and answer the tough questions about rising technology. Only with sci-fi could you have a murder mystery where the killer killed his own clone, and debate the morality of that act.

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      2. Alfred Bester (no, not the one in B5) was a master of that sort of ethical exploration SF; The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination (Tiger, Tiger) are a couple of examples. So were Zelazny and Kornbluth.

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          1. So did he model himself after Dr. Moreau, or after Dr. Jekyll? Or, as you said, after Dr. Mengele?

            So many defective models to choose from!

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        2. Straczynski was a Bester fan, and named the Psi Cop after him. I’d give at least partial credit if someone picked the B5 one.

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          1. Note, in the Psi Corps trilogy (approved by Straczynski) the character named Alfred Bester was given that name by another character in the Book because the other character was a fan of the author Alfred Bester. [Grin]

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  4. I discovered the science fiction section in the children’s section of the library when I was… um… maybe 8? I know I was too young to get books in the adult section, though my mother could take them out for me, if she was around. At some point I had read everything they had available, and there was a bit of a pause for a few years. The only local “bookstore” was the basement of the local office supply store which had a bunch of paperback “classics”. At 10 — or maybe 11 or 12, memory has gotten pretty unreliable — my favorite books were Ivanhoe, Pride and Prejudice, and the Count of Monte Cristo, which I read and re-read because I actually owned (grubby) copies of them.

    We had a fair number of books in our house too, for the time, but those had been long read and tended to consist of Readers Digest book club books and cheap bible story collections.

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    1. I was very fortunate in having a good local library (in walking distance back when children were allowed to walk places by themselves) and librarian.
      I ran out of SF and science fact books in the children’s section when I was 7. So one day (while the librarian just watched) I walked into the adult section, looked up a subject in the card catalog, and went into the stacks to find the book I wanted, and took it to the counter.
      The librarian checked to make sure it wasn’t anything inappropriate and let me check it out, along with giving me a note to take to my parents to sign so I wouldn’t be restricted to the children’s section.

      Treating children according to their ability & behavior is something we could use more of these days

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    2. I hated it when a library wouldn’t let me check out a book because they had decided it was too advanced for me. I went to grade school in a single campus school that was everything from kindergarten through High School and was constantly wanting to read high school books in grade school. I literally took tests that said I was reading at a college level. You’d think that would count for something.

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      2. I was reading a collection of Shakespeare’s works in 5th grade and actually had a teacher tell me it was too advanced for me. In retrospect, I suspect it was too advanced for HER…

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        1. Fifth grade was when older son lost patience with his English teacher, took over the class and decoded all the dirty jokes in Romeo and Juliet.
          …. yes, yes, I got the phone call. Bet you the kids liked Shakespeare better afterwards, though ;)

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      3. On the other hand, I do know an avid reader who is still angry about the librarian who figured bunnies were for children and put Watership Down in the children’s section. He was not ready for 1984, even with bunnies, when he tried it.

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  5. Speaking of books in that room, I must admit to a desire to build a bookcase readily available to the porcelain fixture. The fact that said bathroom had zero exhaust if the window was closed put a stop to that. Haven’t done the same in the more modern bath, but Kindles have been known to show up there.

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  6. My love of RAH was aided and abetted by my brother’s future brother-in-law. He had a large selection of Heinlein paperbacks, I believe through Stranger, most of which I hadn’t seen before. I managed to fill the gaps, though the paperbacks didn’t make the move to Flyover County. I’ve done some backfilling via Kindle, but that’s far from complete.

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  7. The truth is, I’ve got a monkey on my back, a habit worse than marijuana though not as expensive as heroin. I can stiff it out and get to sleep anyway–but it wasn’t helping that I could see light in Stars tent and a silhouette that was no longer troubled by a dress.
    The fact is I am a compulsive reader. Thirty-five cents’ worth of Gold Medal Original will put me right to sleep. Or Perry Mason. But I’ll read the ads in an old Paris-Match that has been used to wrap herring before I’ll do without.

    From a little story by a retired Navy man you’ve probably never heard of.

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    1. Glory Road ? Seems familiar. And yes it is a bad habit though less destructive (usually) than Tobacco, Alcohol or drugs. And given the last time I looked a pack of Marlboro’s was $10 and say Way of Kings was $12 the book will outlast(even a voracious reader would take a couple days for that tome) 20 deathsticks and be less likely to give you cancer.

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      1. You can only smoke a pack of Marlboro’s once, you can read a book so many times the pages are worn away, and that usually takes decades (unless it’s acid-based paper.)

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      2. Yep, Oscar is watching Star’s silhouette. He winds up borrowing a book by Albertus Magnus from Rufo.

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      3. I’ve told the story, but my Dad tried to keep at least a few “age inappropriate books,” out of my greedy little hands. I saw him reading Glory Road and asked him, “Can I read it?”

        “You’re not ready.”

        A bit later he found me with the copy of Stranger from the junior high school library (!). A day or two after that he handed me Glory Road, with the comment, “You’re ready.”

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        1. So, the equivalent of, “So you want to wear a strapless gown? Fine. Put it on; if it stays up you’re ready for it.”😉

          Not original, but I can’t remember where I read it.

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    3. Also guilty of being a compulsive reader. I even took paperbacks to summer camp and, gasp, backpacking! Hey at least worst comes to worse, survival wise, good tinder (shudder, but … needs must. Never needed.) These days? Not so much with the ebooks.

      Interestingly there is no 12-step program for us. Guess we just need to suffer.

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  8. My wife and I are both readers (in the immersive sense) and we tried our best to inculcate that in our kids (five of them – we put down the books from time to time). When they were quite young, my wife brought them almost daily to the library; they couldn’t get their own library cards back then so my wife checked out their books, and all the librarians knew my wife’s card number by heart.

    All of our kids, now long since grown, read, but four read incessantly and have passed the virus on to their kids – our 15 grandchildren range from toddlers to college, but even the toddlers love to be read to.

    How sad to see how the TL;DR pox has infected so many today.

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  9. I confess that as a junior reader, I never really got drawn into science fiction. What I did adore were historical adventures; things like the Little House series, and even some kid novels that I didn’t even realize were historical. My mother had us signed up for a book club that reprinted old public domain novels – a lot of Louisa May Alcott (Little Men, Under the Liliacs, Eight Cousins) and Frances Hodgson Burnett (Secret Garden, Little Princess, Little Lord Fauntleroy). In my mind, after reading all of these – I just assumed that they were set sort of recently – just without electricity, and horses instead of automobiles.

    When we started at the public library, I liked the Freddy the Pig series, because of the witty conversation among the critters. And I went through every book in the house, when I was about eight, checking out the first couple of chapters to see if they were interesting. Dad’s anthropology books were fascinating, because of the pictures of skeletons and things. I read all about Piltdown Man – this was when it was still taken seriously, not revealed as a hoax. It was a good thing that the first couple of chapters of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was pretty boring…

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  10. So, I’m mildly dyslexic. I didn’t learn to properly read until 2nd grade. But both my parents are readers, my older brothers are both readers, and I can be stopped in my tracks by a half-decent story. Now, I will read the ingredient list off the side of a box of cereal if there’s nothing else on offer. Between 2nd and 5th grade I went from barely reading to reading my parents’ books. There was an enormous bookshelf built into the space under the stairwell, sturdy enough for a six year old to climb to reach the top shelves. The books were two and three rows deep sometimes. I’d pick something that looked good and ask my folks, can I read this? No? Okay, go pick another. This? Excellent.

    I grew up reading Anne McCaffery, Ian Fleming and James Gardner, the StarWars and StarTrek novels. I spent a summer gorging on the DragonLance series and wound up burning myself out on them, never to return. My uncle found out I liked to read when I was about 8 and dumped his load of Louis L’Amour books on me. After that I carried a list of the ones I already had with me when I went to the bookstore, to try and avoid buying Flint again, again. Now I live off my sister’s KU account (and she lives off my Audible account. More severely dyslexic than I am and I don’t have time to read to her most nights anymore.)

    I was the weird girl who read on the bus home from school instead of talking about whatever with the other kids. And then I’d read as I walked home from the bus stop. I was the only one allowed to take more than 5 books out at a time from the school library, mostly because the librarian knew my older brothers before me and knew I’d have them back to her by Monday. If my parents wanted to punish me, they didn’t send me to my room, because I had my books there.

    I read a poll or something a few years back that said that the average person in America only read one book a year, and I was astonished. What the hell did they do with their time? And there must have been a whole lot of them because I knew for a fact my family alone would have skewed the numbers something fierce on a poll like that.

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    1. Regarding your last paragraph…..I once worked with a girl (I think she was nineteen) who looked at me reading on break and on lunch and said “I wish I could read like that.” Upon further conversation, she admitted that she didn’t own any books.

      This was shocking to me, because by eighth grade almost EVERYONE in my small school read. Some read trashy romances, some read fantasy/sci-fi, some read Westerns, but reading was just….normal.

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        3. Maybe not more than 5 books physically on your person. I mean, not counting my kindle, I rarely carry more than two around with me, you know, in case I finish the first one before I get back home. But limiting myself to just 5 books in my house? Would you like to tell me how many friends I’m allowed to have while you’re at it?

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            1. My beloved has a means test for whether someone is SCA/Fandom material: he asks how many books they own. If they know, they’re probably not candidates. Unless they have them cataloged via the Dewey Decimal System.

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          2. If someone told me I should only have 5 books in my house I would sic the dog on them. Okay, she’s a pomeranian who would just want pets and treat, but still.

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          3. Oh well, Marie Kondo… or whatever her name is. At what point she said to put all of your books in a pile in the middle of the room (iirc, for sorting I think) and I laughed hysterically. If we had done that, nobody would have been able to get into the room.

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        4. She said something along the lines of “Don’t keep things that don’t spark joy. I don’t read for pleasure, so I only keep less than 5 books in the house”

          Most people seem to forget the first part of what she said.

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          1. Well, it was relayed from my sister, who had been following the woman’s videos. According to her it was a direct quote, and it almost made her rethink following the woman.

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            1. oh, the quote of “ideally, keep less than 5 books” is quite accurate, but the larger context of her work changes one’s understanding of it.

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            1. If you don’t mind the place being dirty (cleanliness not sparking joy), why waste money and storage space on cleaners?

              Believe me, if I could get my wife to go along with that…..

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          3. Until now I’ve only ever heard the first part.

            “Don’t keep things that don’t spark joy” has become a meme.

            But, for me, books are one of the few things that do spark joy.

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        5. Didn’t have time to hit the library before travelling summer after grade 4, so my mom grabbed 2 books off her shelf for me: Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy omnibus, and Stranger in a Strange Land.

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        1. Hard to do when they can barely read at all. When they’re told to struggle with the abomination of ‘whole word’ reading. When they’re not taught that spelling, grammar and diction are important when it comes to conveying information.

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            1. How can you understand a ‘whole language’ without understanding all the parts and how they fit together? It would be like trying to understand a ‘whole car’ without knowing anything about bolts, gears, and bearings, much less engines and transmissions.

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              1. They’re Credentialed Education Experts (TM). When I was in school (just before Pangea split) we had teachers, who knew the material and how to teach it. Today we have a Department of Education, full of “experts” who aren’t interested in teaching, just in expanding their bureaucracy, and “Teachers’ Colleges” which seem to operate along the same lines as the management theory which says that managers need only know how to manage, not what the people they manage actually do.

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                1. I swear they’re a Cargo Cult. Go through the motions, recite the incantations, and Education will Just Happen! All their failures are blamed on the students, the parents, video games…

                  I know! It’s Society’s to blame!

                  “We’ll be runnin’ them in too.”

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                    1. Yep.

                      “If we wish for it real hard, make all the right gestures, and say all the right words, we’ll have Paradise!”

                      The “philosophy” of toddlers.

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  11. Pretty sure my introduction to science fiction was a collection of Mom’s that I can’t remember enough of to find again. I do remember one story about a spaceman whose ship ran out of fuel. The engine took its fuel in the form of a metal wire. He had to land on a strange planet where everything was unique. There was a field in which every plant was different, for example. He found a building, and a room with several spools of wire, snipped off samples, took them back to the ship and found that one of them would power the engine. Yay! Returning to get a bigger piece, he encountered the owner, something so alien his brain overloaded and he passed out. Fortunately, the alien didn’t notice him, he got his wire and escaped from the planet.

    I definitely remember reading the 2 volume Anthony Boucher collection ‘A Treasury Of Great Science Fiction’ a few years later.

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    1. First sci-fi book I read was The Forgotten Door, in 2nd grade I think. My addiction was not in any way moderated by Ararat.

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        1. I recall reading “Stowaway to the Moon”. Kid sneaks onto an Apollo mission. Hides in a storage compartment. Manages to stay hidden until TLI burn.

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      2. Good grief! I don’t think I’ve thought about that book in over fifty years.

        I looked it up, and I remembered the title, the author’s name, and the cover, but I have no memory whatsoever about the book itself, and the online review didn’t trigger anything.

        Looking at Key’s bibliography, I just barely remember the plot of “Escape from Witch Mountain”, which I probably read about the same time as the Door. I remember a movie or TV show of the same name, but I never saw it. (or them)

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        1. Me, too.

          I’m remembering one called, “Year of the Comet, ” I think, where the plot is Earth passes through a comet’s tail and the atmosphere gains particles which cause metal machinery to seize up. The protagonist, teenage boy because it’s that sort of book, is the son of a world-class chemist and helps the adult scientists find a way to precipitate the particles out of the atmosphere. But not before the obligatory battle with the horde of desperate but uneducated men both seeking food for their families and an end to the science they believe has brought the curse upon them. At least they were lead by an old woman with witchy properties rather than a deranged minister.

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        2. “Escape from Witch Mountain” and “Return to Witch Mountain” both “made for TV” Disney films. Shown on “Sunday Disney in Techno Color” in the ’60s.

          (I’ve already said “Yes, I’m old.” Many times.)

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    2. I read a collection of — not very well written — French science fiction, before, at age 13, I realized it was erotica. Which explained why it was so badly written (like they were not interested in the tech stuff. What was wrong with them?) and kept talking about how this girl took showers,a nd what not.
      …. part of the problem is that I was skipping all the “hot” stuff (still do. Not a voyeur. Having realized it ahd nothing to do with the story or character development, I just skipped it.) So I had no idea. Face>palm. (I also didn’t realize “erotica” was a thing.)

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      1. I doesn’t help that a lot of the “erotic” moments that turn up in books I read are just… boring.

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      2. Oh good. I’m not the only one who skips the erotica portions of novels. I gritted through the end of the Clan of the Cave Bears … Thank goodness Outlander has gotten away from a lot of it in the newer books. Now I filter away from books that tout the explicit scenes. Preaching to the choir here, but for crying out loud, Fade to Black do not need the details.

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    3. The short story is “Hobbyist” by Eric Frank Russell. He’s also the person who wrote Wasp and Next of Kin, both stories that would fit well in the HFY dynamic.

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      2. Oh, definitely to both. “Kin” was also published as “The Space Willies.”

        “Sleeping Planet” from William R. Burkett riffed well off The Space Willies. Heck, he might have had the basic idea independently.

        Burkett wrote Sleeping Planet in 1965, but isfdb says he wrote a couple more books in 1998 and one in 2015. I’ll have to find copies of them…

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  12. The first science fiction book I ever read was The Incredible Flight to the Mushroom Planet. It was recommended to me by the librarian who let me go into the 3rd grade section to get it because I had read everything in the 1st and 2nd grade sections. She said, since I loved the fairytale books,( remember all the different color ones?) I might like it.

    I was hooked! Best book I had ever read until that point.

    The first fantasy book I ever read was The Hobbit when I was 10. My mother had a friend who thought I might like it, since it was “kind of a fairytale “.

    I too spent my whole life desperate for reading material. I read my hubby’s collection of Louis L’Amour books when we were first married although I’d never read a western in my life. I liked them.

    My mom was a reader too, but she liked romance stuff. Just couldn’t read it. I read my dad’s Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines instead. Plus library books every day.

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  13. i recently bought a used copy of the Lensman series, which is the first scifi book I remember. My parents had very few books and didn’t like to take us to the library because they thought my brother and I read too much and it was making us antisocial. But Mom would buy us books at garage sales, frequently the$1/box type so I read ANYTHING. We would treat through the boxes looking for anything that looked scifi ish. Turn fight over who got it first. Loser got the rest of the books. So romance, mystery, westerns all got thrown in. Just never horror because I got nightmares.

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    1. I also didn’t read horror. In fact there was a science fiction that was near enough it gave me nightmares for months. I don’t know the name in English, but I suspect it will come up going through the list.

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      1. I never did horror because of nightmares too. And I don’t watch a lot of movies because of that. I’m very visual and can’t get disturbing images out of my mind easily.

        I did go through an Edgar Allen Poe phase in high school, though. Mostly his poetry.

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      2. Also do not read horror because of nightmares.

        Starting to filter away from some thrillers too. Remember “Relic”? I remember when the movie came out. Hubby said “looks interesting.” Me? “No! Read the book. Scared the hell out of me! No. Just No!” Never have seen the movie. “Requiem” the sequel wasn’t quite as bad because the premise behind it was known, but still … Nope.

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        1. I had just finished a story where the protagonist and his fiancee had been shipwrecked on an island covered in gray fungus, and yes, it was consuming them. It was a, “two indistinguishable figures in a lifeboat in the fog explaining why the next lifeboat would be better off heading out to sea,” story.

          Thoroughly unsettled, I went into the front yard and went looking for a praying mantis. (I had a thing for them). As it happened, it was twilight. Did you know that when the light hits a given level, a mantis’ eyes suddenly shift from green to gray?

          I freaked right out. So now, I don’t seek out horror, either.

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        2. Nope – I’m another one who doesn’t do horror, having a vivid imagination. No to books (I’m skipping over whole pages of Barbara Hambly’s Guest at the Wedding) and absolutely no to horror movies. I did sit through a showing of American Werewolf in London, because I was with a friend who had seen it before, and told me when I had to close my eyes and cover my ears.

          Yeah, Stephen King is right out.

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          1. I could admire his technique in his earlier books, but had no interest in the subject matter.

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          2. I can watch it, if it’s old enough and low tech enough to where the gross-out elements are minor, but I don’t like to read it, unless we’re talking about Edwardian era ghost stories or something equally ancient and bloodless.

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          3. His Firestarter kept me sleeping with the lights on for months! Someone told me it wasn’t very scary……

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        3. The movie Relic was a laugh riot for me. I’d read the book and the sequel and was excited to see the movie, only it was … well. There was no Pendergast. How can you have a Pendergast story with no Pendergast? And they killed the monster with ‘Science’ (TM) to dispel the primitive superstition. It was totally ridiculous.

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      3. Definite no to horror for me although I did read Dracula. And I have looked up plot summaries to horror novels on Wikipedia out of curiosity before.

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  14. I failed English because I was reading too much. The instructor in summer school (had to make up the class to graduate) took one look at me, asked me why I was there among that interesting set of individuals. I explained, he laughed and assigned me to read for my penance.

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    1. 8th grade English teacher used to get super mad that I’d read in class, but couldn’t really discipline me because I could still answer any question she asked me or add intelligently to the discussion underway if called upon. So one Friday she asked me to stay a moment after class. She pulled out a stack of books, said she was thinking of having future classes read them and wanted to know what I thought of them.

      On Monday, after class I stopped at her desk and started pulling the books out of my backpack. “This one is too low a reading level for this class. This one has some mature themes that you might want to be careful of in how you discuss them. This one-“

      “You read them all?!”

      “Wasn’t that the point?”

      I guess she thought she was going to teach me a lesson or something? Anyway, she left me alone after that. My pre-calc teacher on the other hand, started standing at the door to confiscate my book on the way into class, so I started bringing a decoy book to hand to her.

      Teachers that try to discourage their students from reading always confused me.

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      1. I suspect – not knowing any of them – that it was more Time Place Occasion than “don’t read”.

        I mean, if you’re going to read in calculus class, the least you can do is read a calculus book.

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        1. Yeah, I’d done that the night before after I finished my homework. Doing it again while she explained it to the kids who didn’t do the reading was BORING! Not my fault the other kids either didn’t get it or didn’t have parents that could explain when they had questions.

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        2. Twice I’ve fussed at kids reading during my class. First time, the kid was ignoring the assignment I’d just handed out to read a novel. (Assignment was a timed quiz). Second time, the student was ignoring lecture material that was NOT in the textbook in favor of desperately trying to get the English assignment done. The student really needed the in-class material in order to understand not only the lesson but a current-event assignment in a different class.

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    2. Health Class in 10th grade. He made us each read a couple of paragraphs, then moved on to the next person. I would sit and read until the person before me started to read. Then down book, open text find where we were and read when it was my turn. One time he foxed me. E suddenly jumped across the room and called on me way out of turn. I put down my book and opened the text….and it feel open to exactly where it needed to be and started reading with barely a break. I read two pages while he stood there in shock. Then he said ok and went back to the next kid in order.

      I got lectured by my father to not keep doing that as he had to work with the guy. It would have been more effective if he hadnt been laughing.

      I did apologize to the teacher and we discussed it. His class did improve

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      1. Teachers had a choice. Let me read and half listen while they lectured, or let me zone out, even as I took notes. Because it was either one or the other. Latter was my problem as I was in college.

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  15. I grew up reading everything.

    I devoured fiction, including science fiction and fantasy, for 30+ years until my brain said “No more”. Now I stick to history, biographies, science and technical tomes.

    Went from a collection of thousands to almost zero fiction books in the house.

    Same thing happened with movies and television. And the spouse has thousands of movies and telesisions series on tap from any device in the house, but they hold no attraction.

    Reality got so crazy, interesting, and rewarding, I don’t want to confuse it with fiction.

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  16. The first Heinlein I read was HSWT at around 8 years old (around 3rd grade). But being a couple of years older than our Esteemed Hostess, we had yet to land on the moon.

    The library was a bi-weekly trip (we could check out books for up to 2 weeks) and I always maxed out the number of books I could check out. I could spend hours wandering around the stacks and checking out interesting looking titles.

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  17. I suspect I might have lived a privileged life of literary luxury. I remember my first encounter with SF. It was in 1961. I was in second grade –7-going-on-8. I came across a paperback book in the school library (Loveland Elementary in Omaha). The cover illustration fascinated. Let’s see how many of us can recognise this from my description. The central foreground figure was a young man in a skin-tight blue jump suit, stepping off to climb a ladder. The background was a concrete plain that stretched off to the horizon. In the distance were a scattering of … spaceships? — spherical objects — obviously huge — standing on legs like so many water or gasoline tanks. The title was two words, the author’s first name sounded androgenous (and a second-grader had no idea of what that meant).

    In reading the book, I learned it was a part of a series. It would be two years before I found the prequel and grabbed it up. But I was hooked. I learned the phrase “science fiction” and to look for it in the description of books I selected. Read nothing but for a couple of years. Red Planet. Mr Tycho’s Planet. A side trip into Bea Potter’s Amazing Journey, from which Iearned to look for fantasy, with increasingly sophisticated taste.

    By the time I was in 4th grade, I had an adult library card from the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County and was checking out and reading a book a day (in lots of 5-6). I remember my fifth grade classmates expressing skepticism that I could read five (hefty, including biographies of Douglas MacArthur and JFK) seven-day books in a week. We had an extensive library at home (which I envy and wish I could re-create, but it’s long scattered in the winds. In the attic were the colored fairy tale books, an Encyclopedia Brittanica, a complete collection of National Geographics from the first number to date (which the ‘rents maintained and kept up-to-date), a set of the original Tarzan books (First edition, printed during WWI), and — the piece de resistance — a ten-foot-by-six shelves — double-sided case of paperbacks: science fiction on one side and murder mysteries on the other. I was truly spoiled. Oh, and various classics and near-classics from my mother’s childhood, such as Joel Chandler Harris and Josephine Tey and Daphne du Maurier and… and… The space was the full footprint of the house — maybe 30×60 — and chockablock with reading material.

    And my sister had a friend from her ballet classes whose family owned a bookstore downtown. I can’t tell you how many Ballantine books I bought there in high school, when I had my own hard-earned money to spend on such luxuries.

    I pretty much read every SFF book published in the ’50s and ’60s. I could probably never remember them all.

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    1. Until 3rd grade it was believed I couldn’t read. Then when moving grandma from 4th street to 24th, a box of books were put into the car to keep us kids out of the way. Granted we had to take turns reading to the 4 year old, but we read. Two problems were discovered. 1) I have problems reading aloud (still do, I’m 68). But not comprehensive reading. 2) Classroom reading books are B O R I N G!

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      1. We didn’t know younger son could read till he was 8. Then I realized all my books were misshelved. he’d been tearing through my mystery and science fiction. He just didn’t know the alphabet order, so he couldn’t put them back in place.

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        1. I had the opposite problem. Went to my son’s first parent-teacher conference in kindergarten and had her explain to me that he was doing great! with recognizing letters and sounds. Halfway through I told her he was reading chapter books at home since he was 4. I will say the school system took my boys, who were avid readers, and turned them off from any books. Took me decades to get them back to reading.

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          1. They almost did that with #2 son. i spent years screaming “Stop guessing, sound it out.” (I should point out we didn’t know he read well enough to read for pleasure.)
            First grade, the teacher told us older son was disabled and might never learn to read. … Mostly because he was so bored… He was reading YA books at home (In fact, she’d confiscated the Johnny Maxwell trilogy which he was reading in class!) and had no interest in reading picture books. Also his spelling was (still is if he’s tired) appalling and she missed the snark on the notes he wrote on the side of tests…
            This is why we had to have him tested, and diagnosed as “profoundly gifted.” Poor kid. (I mean better than his brother who is a standard deviation above him, but still.) ;)
            Older son says he doesn’t remember not reading. He was the one I caught reading Caesar’s biography at 3. This is good, btw, they COULDN’T mess up his reading habit. They tried hard with his brother.

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            1. I learned to read when I was three. Skipped kindergarten and started first grade at 5-going-on-6. The teacher was ecstatic! Told my mother how after hearing the stumbles and stammers of “See – Spot – – -r-r- run.” over and over, she would call on me because I could not only read out loud, I could read with expression!

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          2. My older brother read Moby Dick before kindergarten started. The teacher sent a little ‘get to know your child’ thing home and one of the questions was ‘does your child pretend to read’. My mother wrote in ‘no, he reads.’ A week later, the teacher called in a panic. ‘He reads!’ ‘I did tell you’. ‘I thought you were just being proud momma, but he READS!’ He also, at one point, stood up in class to protest her dumbing down his reply to a question for the rest of the class to tell her that she was being redundant and that her explanation of his reply had been superfluous.

            They finally gave up and skipped him over kindergarten.

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            1. Manitou Elementary held on to not skipping grades hammer and tongues. They lied to us and told us it was illegal in Colorado. It took bringing younger son home for a year for them to go “Oh, yeah, we should skip him a grade.”
              They were wrong. THEY SHOULD have skipped him four.

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              1. Yeah, they kept telling my folks that it wouldn’t be good for him socially because he ‘wouldn’t fit in’ with his classmates. He was an ODD. He wasn’t going to ‘fit in’ no matter where they put him. When he was three he was still pointing and grunting, and one day my mom told him she wasn’t going to play the guessing game anymore and he needed to use his words. ‘Okay, then I’d like a glass of water, please.’

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              2. Neighbors tried to start their 4 year old in kindergarten because her birthday was late September, not before school started. District said no. Next year came around, by middle of Kindergarten, school goes, we need to test her and maybe move her up a year, or two. Parents allowed the testing. But when it came to moving her up? Nope. She how has friends her age. You dealt this hand, deal with it. They ended up moving away so don’t know how it all worked out elsewhere.

                I started 1st grade (no kindergarten back then) at age 5. Cutoff age 6 before November 1. Also meant I started college at age 17.

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                1. Right there with ya. Though I saved myself some money and awkwardness by going to community college for a few semesters before transferring to the uni I ended up graduating from.

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                  1. Would have been better to go to local community college first, yes.

                    OTOH would not have had the first summer after freshman year as my first forestry job. Wouldn’t have met my future to be hubby to start a 5 year friendship, at first as part of the same groups (never classes, he had graduated) at the reconstituted Forestry Club meeting. If we’d started dating then? Well, I was 17, he was 22 …

                    Worked out for the best.

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  18. Sigh….

    History of concussions. They are cumulative. I have well crossed into “Traumatic Brain Injury” levels.

    Alas, my “books a day” ability is long gone. Soemtimes I forget I have read a book, and re-read it with a stange sense of familiarity. Reading is no longer easy or effortless, it would count as “learning disabled” now.

    Still reading, still have a pile to go, especially after a recent con. (grin) Never Quit.

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    2. Somewhat. Also somewhat self chosen to slow down reading. Especially when a new anticipated book comes out. “I will take my time!” Rarely succeed but I try. Gets put on the re-read pile quickly.

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  19. I think there are two types of people: those who have read science fiction, and those who have never read science fiction.

    Not a joke, I think the latter don’t understand the present. They have no frame of reference to understand our common era.

    It’s a real problem.

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      1. left wing guy went to jail couple years ago. Right of Center guy, lefty by US standards, just got ousted because “austerity”. They’re blaming having to increase military spending, I.e., Trump, naturally.

        It’s Soros all the way down. Romania, Poland, Brazil. The ex president of the Philippines just got,pulled off a plane. Germany refuses to form a representative government. It’s a dangerous time to be a normal person right now because the lefties are taking the mask off.

        Thank God we overcame the margin of fraud.

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          1. me too. They’re not powerful enough to withstand it.

            Oh. DoEducation RIF is 50% of workforce effective this month, it had been reported to be a third earlier. Now do HUD.

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            1. 50%? What are they SMOKING? The whole putrid Department Of Maleducation has to be burned down, knocked over and sunk into the swamp! It has spent 47 years and $2 TRILLION turning our public schools from semi-functional to utterly dysfunctional! How can anybody not see that?

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              1. Are you criticizing Linda McMahon for only giving you half of exactly what you want in her second week on the job? After 47 years of every administration running as fast as they could in the opposite direction?

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                1. I just saw her on the Laura Ingraham show going on about ‘preserving the Good Programs’. Keeping the slop trough half-full for the ‘good’ piggies. NYET! That’s like preserving the ‘good parts’ of a malignant tumor. If you don’t cut the whole thing out and cauterize, it just grows back worse than ever.

                  Trump and Musk have to cut off ‘federal funding’ to the states. Which really means stealing money from the people, aggregating it in the D.C. sewer, and then doling it back out to their donors and ‘NGO’ cronies. Don’t take the money OUT of the states in the first place! Then they’ll be able to fund their own programs.

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                  1. I haven’t seen the interview, and I can’t claim to read her mind, but she has publicly stated that she sees the “final mission” of the Department of Education as moving control of education back to the states. Plus things like the school lunch program have to be handled carefully unless you want to hear four years of “Trump is starving poor children!”

                    In any case, it’s going to take an act of Congress to abolish the department entirely, so everything happening right now is just prep work. If keeping the “good programs” in some capacity is what it takes to let Congress axe the department, that’s still a massive win. And if Congress doesn’t act, then whatever cuts she’s able to make are still a step in the right direction.

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                    1. For the record, they put kids on school lunches without means testing, without parents say so, and without notifying the parents. My kids were put on school lunches when Dan was temporarily unemployed. We hadn’t TOLD them but it was a small town. And it was a heck of a job getting them OFF it.

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                    2. Plus things like the school lunch program

                      Which isn’t even handled thru DoEd; it’s USDA. Part of the problem is telling the players without a scorecard.

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                    3. That’s…sadly what I’ve come to expect. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of graft or simple misallocation is in the program. But it’s a bomb that needs careful defusing to avoid scuttling the whole operation. If we go after the school lunches too early, it gives Congress an excuse to keep the Department of Education. There’s talk of giving the program to HHS, which seems like a good stopgap.

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                    4. Nesting is borked, but @snelson134: That’s good to know. I’m mostly going off prior discussion I’ve seen. My broader point is that it makes sense to save the hostage puppies in the short term, even if they need to be put down later. It sounds like that’s what Linda McMahon is trying to do with the Department of Education, so that Congress has the fig leaf of “everything important is taken care of”, but time will tell.

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                2. Yep. To quote grandma, we want it GIVEN AND SPREAD. (She tried to convince me this meant butter. Heck, she might have believed it. She was curiously innocent.)

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              2. The time a “trans girl” molested a kindergartener in the girls’ room and the school “investigated” and said it didn’t happen, the Department of Ed was the ones who said the investigation was a civil rights violation in itself.

                We may need something of that nature. Perhaps move it to Justice.

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                1. The case I heard about was the 14 year old girl. The ‘authorities’ covered up the rape, transferred the ‘trans’ to another school where the degenerate raped another girl. They tried to cover that up too, and then had her father arrested as a ‘domestic terrorist’ for demanding justice. Heads need to roll!

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                  1. I think that all the convicted rapists who discover they are transwomen while they are in jail, and then commit serial rapes when transferred to women’s prisons, are.

                    Liked by 1 person

                  2. At the kid level, almost any mental health / behaviour issue is labelled trans, these days. Most of these kids are *not* well. Some are pervs, sure, but most? Victims.

                    As for the adults? Yeah, a ton of pervs, predators, and autogynophiles.

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  21. Ah, nostalgia!

    Used to read ahead in our reading book, in class, while following the story we were supposed to be reading aloud. Got called on picked right up and read my part …

    Lived a bit remotely in 6th/7th grade, so had a bookmobile to visit. Ran them out of Westerns, and driver suggested Rocket Ship Galileo.

    High school one summer lived on Hamilton AFB. I’d walk to the base library, check out about five, read them all, and be back the next day. Wiped out their biographies, westerns, SF, and military history.

    Long time member of SF book club and shorter member of Military Book Club, out of both now for quite a while. Used to be member of Book of the Month Club – the starting bonus was the 2-volume, 4-page-images per page of Oxford English Dictionary.

    When we moved in 2019, had to get rid of a lot of books; new house uses wall space differently; more windows, mostly, So most things now are Kindle/digital. I think I still have a couple of Judith Merrill’s Best SF paperbacks – over 50 years old, and not quite falling apart.

    Still like SF and Fantasy, but I noticed that many series had to keep building up the ‘opponent’ until things got weird. Like Blish’s Cities in Flight, but eventually had to restart the universe!

    Have sort-of-annual re-reads: LOTR, Correia’s MHI, Butcher’s Dresden Files. Have 15 or so new Kindles plus maybe 6 in-progress. Some of those are good for a bite now and again as a change of pace.

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  22. Reading is a necessary thing. Lately I’ve been going through L.E. Modesitt—finished up Recluce and the Corean Chronicles, read the ghost books (which I didn’t appreciate the first time, so thought I’d try again), and will probably do the Imager books next.

    One thing that has been accidentally fascinating is how much economics affects the worlds he’s writing—specifically how overspending gets you into deep trouble and limits your future options. One thing I hadn’t read before was the Recluce Tales short story compilation, and the foreword, where he talks about how he wanted a fantasy world based on sound economics. And then he writes about how he came up with the magic system, starting with how coal is formed… at which point I started laughing, because I finally understand why his writing style, which should be highly unappealing, is so much fun for me to read.

    He’s a wonk. And he really appreciates deep knowledge, and it shows through in his writing. I don’t really know many writers who show second and third-order effects like he does*.

    *Someone was just arguing with me about a different author whose worldbuilding I was complaining about. My comment was that a subsistence-level town that has only in the last year managed to gain prosperity would not be able to absorb a city’s worth of refugees without people starving or freezing to death, or that a culture where all warrior-age males fought demons on a nightly basis, losing people nightly, would have its population crater. The response was a Yeah, But that showed this person had no real clue how freaking hard survival is, or that WWI death tolls matter. Didn’t pursue.

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    1. Modesitt is one of my “go-tos”; I think I own every book he’s had published, the earlier ones mostly in hardcover, but for the past 5 or 6 years all ebooks. If you haven’t read the “Spellsong” series, I recommend it; only 5 novels (Recluce is up to the mid-20s, with more still coming). And most of his one-offs are excellent, too.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. I prefer his science fiction. _Adiamante_. _The Octagonal Raven_. _The Parafaith War_. _Flash_?

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    2. One of my standard rants is how utterly stupid the economic systems are in many medieval level fantasies. They are constantly having people pay GOLD COINS for a night at an inn or similar bullshit. Apparently many fantasy writers have no sense at all of the value of things.

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      2. David Eddings complained he felt Tolkien was “unrealistic,” in that nobody cared about money. His characters do tend to haggle but I don’t remember how much they use gold. (His sweet, ruthless baroness in the Tamuli series is rich because her father figured a way to file/shave gold off coins and remill the edges so the adulteration wasn’t easily seen).

        When I remember Eddings was a Depression kid his obsession with money as money and his various social quirks make more sense. I suspect his family were rabid FDR partisans and he soaked up every bit of Democratic propaganda as he grew up.

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  23. I remember reading older SF back in the Space Shuttle days and thinking it was quaint that writers thought future spaceships would be rockets that landed on their fins. Now that we’re entering a new space age courtesy of Elon Musk and company, it’s not as quaint as it once seemed. And I’m happy to be proven wrong.

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    1. “Space Cadet”! That was my first thought when I saw the Falcon 9 land.

      Just sat in awe for the first StarShip booster catch – that wasn’t even in any writer’s imagination, so far as I know.

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  24. In 7th grade, I moved to high school (only elementary and high school back then). We would have an hour of “study hall” in the day (although almost no one did). I volunteered to be the student librarian for that hour. Out of study hall, quiet because very few other students came in, and I could wander the shelves, peruse, and check out any book I wanted,

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  25. Putting it on my list to keep on track with the revisiting. It should be fun – and almost certainly educational for me. (I don’t have nearly every SFF book ever, despite what $SPOUSE$ may believe.)

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    1. Never understood that. I don’t spend that much time on the throne. 2 or 3 minutes, tops. Barely long enough to open a book and pick up where you left off.

      Except one night last week, I got the 3 AM shits and had to sit there for more than half an hour. Every time I’d ask myself “Is that it? Can I get up now?” my innards said “Nope, you’re staying right there.”

      But reading was about the last thing on my mind.

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      1. It’s a joke, of course. Humidity and bacteria disrecommend keeping our precious tomes in the bathroom. At most, a copy of the latest Farmer’s Almanac. I won’t take my cell in there, either, although I know some do!

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  27. I wasn’t much of a reader until the summer after third grade. Then I got immersed in Little Women, the Chronicles of Narnia, the Anne of Green Gables series, the Enchanted Forest chronicles etc.

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  29. Started SF-ish on the elementary school library’s collection of Tom Swift books (A diving seacopter? Cool!) since Dad wouldn’t have any of that trash in the house. The first ‘serious’ SF I remember was R.U.R. by Capek.

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  30. The first SF book I read, knowing it was SF, was “The Lost Planet” by Paul Dallas. It is one of the Winston Science Fiction juveniles series, and was my older brother’s book. I had forgotten the title and author’s name, but I never forgot the basic plot or those lovely end-papers. A couple of years ago I went hunting for it based on a plot device, and I found it online as a pdf on Scribed! I downloaded it, but it is still in my TBR list. ;-)

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