One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about speculative fiction is that, with the passage of time, such wildly imaginative stories can either be seen as spookily prophetic or quaintly alarmist. Especially when read 20, 30 or 40 years after they were written. Hence, I tend to enjoy reading decades old speculative fiction. The stuff written by the masters of the genre, back in the golden age. Folks like Larry Niven, Fritz Lieber, Frederik Pohl, Phillip Jose Farmer, Philip K. Dick, Theodore Sturgeon, Samuel R. Delaney and Harlan Ellison. The rabble-rousers of the genre, who turned it on its ear beginning in the late 50s.

So, imagine my joy when, back in May, I discovered a dusty old tome at the Tucson library book sale, edited by the aforementioned Ellison and featuring ALL of my favorite speculative writers, entitled Dangerous Visions. My heart skipped a beat and for the two months and smattering of days until I could sit down and read it, I salivated, knowing it would be a goldmine of ideas, many of which would either have come to pass, in one form or another, or have been relegated to the “conspiracy theorist” bin of charmingly off-target viewpoints. Those, that is, which were set only a few decades in the future, rather than centuries.

I was NOT disappointed. At this point in my reading, I’m about half way through the anthology and my delight cannot be quantified. Here we’ve got cautionary tales of life under totalitarian rule, overrun by technology and dangerously close to ecological collapse. Not all at once, naturally, but it’s still uncanny how close some of those writers came to pegging the kind of life we’d all be living here, at the beginning of the 21st century. Alongside those are tales set in orbiting space stations, moon bases and sterile domed cities. Hey, not everyone can get it right, but that doesn’t, in any way, diminish the joy of reading a story set in the far flung future of 1999, or 2010.

I know, all of this tends to make me sound like some kind of elitist sci-fi geek or slumming literary snob, but in point of fact, I’m neither. I just forgot, for a very long time, how much I enjoy reading. My mother was a reading teacher and books were a very important part of our lives, from a very young age. Books were given as birthday and Christmas gifts. “Quiet time” was a social gathering of family members (well, except for the illiterate troll that is my brother), all submerged in worlds apart, but never so far that we couldn’t call for “time” and read a particularly spirited passage out-loud or ask the kind of questions such reading tends to elicit.

It’s one of my happier memories. And one I had shelved for far too long. It’s easy to get sidetracked. Years of working in the movie and entertainment industry weaned me away from books and into the fast-paced, MTV-fed world of instant gratification, personified by banal 22-minute television plots, epic ideas condensed into movies under two hours long and magazine articles that could be read from beginning to end in the time it took to sit down and take a shit. It wasn’t until I found myself living without cable and regular internet access that I rediscovered my joy of reading. And, in the process, my love of the written word.

Oh, but I still love a rollicking half hour episode of The Twilight Zone (Rod Serling is another hero of mine) or The Outer Limits, both the original episodes and the various incarnations from the 80s and 90s. Speculative fiction at its finest and, quite frankly, the kind of inspiration that has been missing from my life for a very long time. And now I find myself preparing for a move back to a city where I found my greatest inspirations and most satisfying moments. The birthplace of my love for writing and one of the sources of inspiration in my storytelling. Yet, I don’t feel like I’m taking a step backwards. Rather, I believe I’m simply returning to my roots. And all that it implies.

I am fervently looking forward to sitting my ass down and putting words on paper again. Not journalistic, fact-based words or short, sweet expostulations aimed at a sixth grade audience with the attention span of crotch mite, but rather speculative words, dredged up from the dank, over-ripe recesses of my own mix-master imagination. A scary place if not navigated correctly, but richly rewarding when done so with narrative intent. Who knows, maybe I’ll even get back to my original stride. It’s been years since I had a short story published. Far too long. My experiences during that time have been rich and varied. Fodder for well-thought-out verse. Believe me. Oh my brothers and sisters, do I have some stories to tell…




Books: literary manna from the gods…