I’ve already blogged about how much I loved to read when I was a schoolboy. I read a lot of classics: Homer’s Odyssey, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Little Men, Jack London’s White Fang and Call of the Wild, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamozov to name a few. I read “modern classics” like Nevil Shute’s On the Beach and Trustee from the Toolroom, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. I suspect most people don’t read a lot today. It’s too easy to sit in front of the TV and have what passes for entertainment shoveled into your brain. Like fast food, it may be schlock but it’s convenient. And that’s too bad. People who don’t read are no better off than people who can’t read.
My favorite genre was science fiction. I read the great writers: Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury, “Doc” Smith, Ellison, Herbert, Pohl, Harrison, Le Guin, Silverberg, Niven, Zelazny, and others. I also read many pulp sci-fi novels from the drugstore book stand. My favorite books were paperback Ace double-novels: two sci-fi novels in one book. An Ace double-novel had two front covers and, consequently, no back cover. I could read a novel, flip the book over, and read another novel. And they cost only 35 cents. As the saying goes, “A bargain at twice the price!”
I’ve also blogged about how, at school, I filled notebooks with my attempts at story-telling. At home I banged out page after page on my family’s old Woodstock typewriter. The typewriter was older than me. I wrote stories, I wrote poems, and sometimes I simply imagined a scene and then described it in writing.
The following paragraphs are from the first page of a short story that I typed when I was a young teen. This was around the time of America’s first manned spaceflight and no one really knew what the Earth looked like from space. Digital computers were multimillion dollar gadgets that the government used. Telephones had rotary dials. Almost no one had a color television. My family’s TV could tune in three channels. In some ways, things were primitive compared to today’s world. I mention that to give some context to my writing. Some of the wording may sound a little dated, but I didn’t change anything. It is just as my young self typed it one day long ago.
A thousand miles from the planet Earth a starship blinked into existence, bringing with it a smaller ship. In the smaller ship a man named Rymer turned his face toward the round viewport beside him and watched the starship dwindle as the engine of his ship placed distance between the two vessels. As he gazed upon it the starship snapped back into nothingness, like a burst soap bubble, and he was alone.
In the warm darkness of his cramped cabin Rymer continued to stare at the space where the starship had been, while his mind braced against the isolation that was already beginning to wash over him. If he could remain alive for the next seventy-two hours he would again see that starship and would move toward it, watching it loom larger and closer until the thin metal shell that was his ship gingerly touched the other silvery hull; then the stars would disappear and he would be on his way home.
He extended a gloved hand toward a switch and the stars began to rain past the viewport. He let the ship roll slowly until he saw the burning spark called Procyon, and then his mind flashed toward a world spinning about that distant sun. His friends were there, as was his life – not here, he thought, on this strange muddy ball called Earth. The starship would reach that distant world in a few days, but his vessel was not a starship and could never make the journey. He was stranded here until the starship returned and nudged against his tiny craft and gripped it in the field of its generators and tore it out of space to hurtle back with it toward that star eleven light years away.
He touched another switch and Earth rose in the viewport, then stopped huge and motionless to fill all space outside the aperture. Rymer stared with cold dislike at the bright planet, for it had caused him to be here and to chance losing his life in hostile space far from his native world. He stared and frowned, while the bright planet gleamed its warm radiance into his face and onto the cabin wall beyond, and at last he rolled the ship away so that he could no longer see the golden world outside.
His eyes skipped among the dials and gauges glowing reassuringly around him before resting upon a screen that held an image of the world outside. As the ship's flight computer executed maneuvers necessary to wrestle the ship into an earth orbit, Rymer adjusted a grid over the image and turned on his reconnaissance equipment. He consulted charts and aimed his instruments at selected points on the planet below, while a machine tabulated radio emission spectra, infrared sources, atmospheric spectrograms, and a dozen other factors. At the completion of his survey Rymer noted with considerable surprise that he had discovered a radio beacon on the planet's surface. Further investigation was required, and as he programmed a computer landing, Rymer wondered if he was about to step into a trap.
A rocket flared silent flame and the ship banked into the first thin stratum of Earth's atmosphere, slowly steepening its angle of descent until the craft began pushing before it a thundering shock wave that streamed back and away from the ship, carrying off the searing heat generated by ramming through miles of atmosphere. Rymer sat inside his small metal world and looked without thinking at the fiery death beyond the viewport.
There are many more pages to this story, but I don’t known where they are now. One day after I’m dead and gone, someone will be cleaning out my house and they’ll find some typewritten pages stapled together. They’ll glance at the pages, maybe flip through a few, they’ll shrug, and they’ll toss the pages into a dumpster. I hope that, at the least, they recycle.
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