My first love

I owe books my life.

That sounds dramatic but when you're a kid growing up in an abusive home, opportunities for escape are few and often self destructive. My youngest brother turned to cough syrup first, then alcohol, and the booze eventually killed him. I turned to books and the other worlds they allowed me to visit. Back then Doubleday Book Club was still a concept, but there were dozens of genre related book clubs to join and the first one I sent my .99 to was the Science Fiction Book Club.

"Eye of the Queen", by Phillip Mann was the first science fiction book I ever read, and Frank Herbert's "Dune" was the second. After that I devoured so many so quickly that the names are now jumbled in memory, and only fragments of the cover designs remain. I was hooked. No doubt part of my obsession with scifi was the fact that my mother vehemently disapproved of me reading it. I was instructed to read books that "built my mind" whatever the fuck that was supposed to mean, although I know the bible was first and foremost on her list of appropriate literary choices, followed closely by Prevention magazine which she subscribed me to every year until she died. It wasn't just her finger wagging that sent me straight to the sci fi cookie jar though. The worlds these books offered me were unlike anything I had ever imagined and nothing like the one I lived in. They were the ultimate escapism.

Where regrets are concerned I have only a few, one of them being that I never pursued an education in science. Back then girls weren't exactly encouraged to go into the STEM programs and with zero support pushing me in that direction I never took the first step. As a result I find all things science (real or fiction) fascinating, but I don't understand many of the technical concepts. I love Star Trek but I don't grok propulsion systems or quantum mechanics. While some fans can argue the mechanics and theory of transporters I'm in the corner drooling and saying "space ships r kool!"

Last night I dusted off a sci fi romance I've had on the back burner for several years and read it with fresh eyes. It made me laugh, not because it's awful (it's actually pretty good) but because it's obvious my first love is the sci fi. The female MC is small... and that's about all the description I really give her, but hey let me tell you about this geriatric C class freighter, the slave planet owned by a mining consortium, the powerful race that controls it, the various politics of the interstellar coalition and.... yeah.

When people ask, I tell them the characters tell me the story. Sometimes I know how it will go, sometimes I'm typing blind. I lost touch with this one halfway through it, but it beckons me back now, and not just me either. It calls to the kid who once read Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" while hiding in a closet with a flashlight, and while my naughty tale of sex, love, and imaginatively endowed aliens doesn't hold a candle to these classics I love it all the same. Later this fall I hope you guys will too.