I met my first real live, honest-to-goodness science fiction writer when I was twelve. It was a sobering experience. Several illusions dissipated in a cloud of reality and it has contoured my thinking about writers in general ever since—unjustly, since the illusions banished had really little to do with writing.
Children tend to take things at face value, approaching life with a literalness that is too often confused with naivete. Perhaps this is due to the way in which a child’s expectations—often of the most sophisticated construction, like fiction—collide so painfully with reality.
Whatever the cause, I went to Carpenter Branch Public Library with a head full of expectations, most of which were based with tortuous logic on the artifacts singularly important to me up to that point—television and books. My father had seen the notice in the newspaper a week earlier and told me about it, knowing full well my love of science fiction and my complete disregard for newspapers. (To me, then, the only useful part of a paper was the movie section or, on the weekend, the tv guide. Oh, yes, the comics, but even these failed to hold my attention. I had comic books in genres absent from the daily comics page. At the profoundly serious age of twelve I believed that comics intended only to be laughed at were for kids.)
The evening of The Event, a week night, saw me being dropped off at the library by my mother. I was to wait when it was over if she hadn’t returned from the supermarket.
Carpenter Branch Library is, still, a rather Gothic structure of granite resembling slightly a English castle or some American architect’s idea of one. It’s blocky and solid and very serious-looking. There were then two sections. (It has since undergone a major reconstruction and while it has the same basic idea, the two sections have been combined into a single space and some of the charm has been lost.) The main building housed the “adult” library. A smaller annex, reached by way of a short hallway with stained glass windows, was the childrens section. Interestingly, all the science fiction in the library was shelved here, right along with Winnie-the-Pooh, Encyclopedia Brown, and others. There was fantasy elsewhere, but I knew next to nothing about that. Lin Carter hadn’t even begun his Adult Fantasy series for Ballantine.
About a dozen, maybe fifteen of us gathered for The Event. I knew none of the other kids. No one from my school had come, which was just as well as far as I was concerned. It was obvious several of the others knew each other. I was asked a couple of times about favorite books and authors and had I read much of tonight’s speaker, but I was inordinately shy and my responses did not invite further conversation.
Chairs had been set out and a librarian asked us to take seats, our guest would be out shortly. We settled down and waited and finally he came out of an office to one side.
My expectations of the world…well, I certainly expected to grow up to be very different than I saw myself then. I was small, rather puny, and had been an easy, perpetual target for class bullies since I’d been in school. I took comfort in the fables of empowerment in which I immersed myself. One of the reasons I loved science fiction then, though I did not consciously understand this, was that much of it depicted worlds in which physical prowess was all but superfluous. I did, however, read plenty that had to do with just such prowess. I watched a lot of it on tv, loved movies about such characters, and had unfortunately built an image of the creators that conformed to their characters. Even then I had stirrings of desire to one day be a Writer and of course I would be a writer like one of these, my idols, who were the Gray Lensman, Lazarus Long, Ned Land, the Dorsai, the Legionnaires of Space.
Out stepped the first writer I had ever seen “in the flesh” and all my illusions died.
I asked no questions that night. I spent most of the session trying not to let my disappointment show. Thick glasses, portly, no chin to speak of, and wearing an ordinary suit and tie. I don’t remember a single thing he said.
What I do remember was his enthusiasm. It was familiar. I understood it. He loved science fiction.
Over the next several weeks I rewrote him in my imagination. He received a make-over. But more important, it sank in past all the other nonessentials that here was an adult—a grown-up, dull, boring, responsible—who loved science fiction. Loved it! All the other adults I knew either didn’t understand it or thought it was a waste of time. One of my teachers actually opined that it was somehow blasphemous because it suggested that we weren’t Jehovah’s one and only single most important creation. In fact, most of my peers thought I was weird for reading the stuff. Oh, they liked the movies and the tv shows, but books? (To be fair, many of them would have found reading for pleasure regardless of genre a singularly bizarre idea—these were largely blue-collar kids who pretty much regarded school as something they had to “get through” before they could do what they wanted, and reading was for sissies. The fact that I read was bad no matter what. That it was science fiction was just sauce for the goose.)
As time passed I stripped away everything else about that night and kept the one thing of value gripped tightly. It was a validating experience. I wasn’t weird or broken or from another planet. And I could look forward to an adulthood in which I could still love science fiction. It was possible. After all, I’d met an adult who loved it.