4 - Wednesday, April 12, 1989 - North Shore News

WHEN THE MOMENT CALLS FOR SOMETHING SPECIAL...

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Bos
HUNTER

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ALTHOUGH NEITHER my teachers, my mother nor the wrapping while you wait.

aunt and uncle who lived with us would have believed it at

the time, I was actually prepariag myself for adult life by
staying up most of the night at the age of 10, reading
science fiction by flashlight under the covers instead of

studying history.

We are talking very early 1950s.
At that time, science fiction was
just beginning to emerge from the
pulp magazine venue where it had
been lumped with fantasy and
sorcery. Except for a handful of
writers — Jules Verne, H.G.
Wells, Oalf Stapledon and C.S.
Lewis — the field had been an in-
tellectually dismal pit of cscapism
since its inception.

But as luck would have it, I
stumbled across my first sci-fi
book just as such writers as Arthur
C. Clarke, A.E. Van Vogt,
Theodore Sturgeon, and Isaac
Asimov were feeling out the shape
of things to come in ways that
none of their respectable literary
colleagues, who were regurgitating
the past and nursing their war
wounds, were coming close to do-
ing.

Te Jeeling that came
to me — and still comes to
me quite often — is that I
have somehow managed,
merely by carrying on day
after normal day — to
travel into the future!”’

Like all great art forms, science
fiction incorporated a little bit of
everything that had gone before.
There were recognizable pirates,
cowboys, explorers, warriors,
detectives, emperors, messiahs and
— always — damsels in distress.
But something more than just ox-
ygen bubbles and rockets had been
added.

As life unfolded from the 1950s,
I continued to read science fiction
almost exclusively until well into
the 1960s, when two things hap-
pened. First, the seminal pool of
original sci-fi ideas seemed to run
out. And, second, life becarne
science fiction.

lt was as though the bizarre
stuff on the pages of the great tales
of the future had escaped into the
atmosphere and become the stuff
of reality. Landings on the moun,
the ongoing threat of nuclear Ar-
mageddon, pollution, mutation,
instantaneous everything.

There is hardly anything I can
think of that has happened to hu-
manity in my adult life that was
not anticipated by one sci-fi writer
or another. The tools of Buck
Rogers’ trade have become the
commonplace items of Japanese
export markets.

Even the architectural styles of
today give me a deja vu rush. I’m
absolutely positive that most ar-
chitects scanned the covers of the
same pulp magazines as I did, rip-
ping off ideas.

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If you go to Singapore, the most
gung-ho futuristic city in the
world, you swear you have been on
board a time machine instead of a
747.

When the Skytrain track was be-
ing erected, I almost fainted. It
was exactly the same design as an
elevated monorail I had seen
depicted in an old sci-fi magazine
back when I was not yet even a
teenager.

The feeling that came to me —
and still comes to me quite often
— is that I have somehow manag-
ed, merely by carrying on day after
normal day — to travel into the
future!

Here it is, all around me: satel-
lite dishes and space shuttles,
laser-beam death rays, microchips,
home computers, answering
machines, Stealth bombers,
levitating trains, people driving
around talking into Cantel com-
munications links, children having
conversations with interactive
robot toys, and weird-looking
half-mutants shambling in their
purple Mohawks through the
streets.

All this is by way of introducing
the fact that I made an exquisitely
painful discovery the other day.

I pretty much stopped reading
science-fiction in the 1960s, as I
said. In fact, as a demonstration of
my new-found maturity back then
— perhaps in response to an in-
stinctive feeling that sci-fi, having
become reality, could serve no
useful escapist purpose any longer
— I gave away my entire science
fiction collection.

For free.

it amounted then, I estimate, to
some 3,000 paperbacks, hard-
covers and magazines. ! had pick-
ed them up usually for about 35
cents, never more than a couple of
dollars.

The other day I wandered, driv-
en by nostalgia, into a used book
store advertising a targe collection
of old sci-fi.

Whereupon I discovered, sealed
in little plastic bags, dozens of the
very editions that I used to own.

The prices varied. But this is the
way they varied: a 35-cent Ace
Double science-fiction paperback
by Philip K. Dick called The
World Jones Made was selling for
$50!

My collection could have been
worth a fortune, possibly $25,000
to $30,000, maybe more.

The one thing none of the
damned science fiction writers
prepared me for, it turns out, was
the inflated value of their books.
Of course, back then, if anyone
had written that a 35-cent paper-
back would be worth $50 by 1989,
not even the sci-fi nuts would have
believed him.

That would have had to be
classified as pure fantasy @

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