Ruminations of an Old Goat

Way back when I was a young lad just learning to read, I don't remember running across any science fiction books for early readers. I could find innumerable books featuring trains, including Roundabout Train, a Golden Book my parents grew very tired of, I requested it so often. There were plenty of Dr. Seuss books and stories about cars, planes, dogs, cats and horses, but not a single book about spaceships. This was the early 1960s and space was only just becoming a topic of interest to most people.

As I discussed last week, I had to get my earliest science fiction from Saturday morning TV shows. Those whet my appetite for written science fiction, yet I do not remember finding any science fiction books aimed at my age range all the way through the third grade. I found plenty of other books, of course, including ones about the pony express and sailing ships and even a small number about about knights in shining armor. But no science fiction.

When I was in the fourth grade, my older sister brought home a library book that captured my imagination. The book was about a young high school girl named Meg, her brilliant-but-eccentric younger brother and their search, with the help of three quite odd women, to find their missing father. Anyone who has read and remembers A Wrinkle in Time, will have recognized the book before I mentioned its title. Madeline L'Engle's story of a cosmic battle between light and darkness, featuring travel by tesseracts and stars that gave themselves up battling the darkness, took me to new worlds and new wonders. While it isn't "traditional" science fiction, it is the first science fiction novel I remember reading. I still love it and re-read it every few years.

Having finally found my first science fiction book, it was as if the flood gates opened. Over the next few years I discovered Lester del Rey's Tunnel Through Time, which is responsible for my ongoing love of time travel stories, and his Runaway Robot, which was the first book I read that humanized robots.

I discovered Alexander Key's Rivets and Sprockets, a fun book about the first trip to Mars, and his more subtle books, The Forgotten Door and Escape to Witch Mountain, about alien children with astounding abilities who have gotten trapped on earth.

More science fiction worked its way into the school library, including books I remember reading but whose authors and titles I simply can't recall. One series I do remember featured Danny Dunn, only son of the housekeeper for a famous, absent-minded scientist. Danny's adventures involved a machine that controlled the weather, a computer he and his buddies used to do their homework and even a flight into outer space. I'm afraid Danny Dunn's adventures are too tame for the current generation of kids, but I loved them.

Then, when I was eleven, the kid across the street loaned a book to me. The paperback had a drawing a huge machine being driven by a man while other men ran along beside it. The world around the machine was totally alien. The book was called Farmer in the Sky by somebody named Robert Heinlein. Despite having a title that didn't exactly inspire excitement, once I started reading the book I couldn't put it down. I loved the book so much I bought it from the kid across the street, paying a dollar for a fifty cent book. It was a good investment, though, as I still own that book. I also discovered that this Heinlein guy had written more books!

From Heinlein, it was easy to jump to Isaac Asimov and Poul Anderson and Ray Bradbury and all the other writers science fiction fans read back in those days. While those are the writers who shaped my love of science fiction, this column is about the writers who got me started reading science fiction. Some of those writers are well known, even today, while even I can't remember the names of some of the writers. But I'm grateful to all of them for starting me on this life-long journey, riding the written word into the future.