I live in a house with a few thousand books; not a curated library of the best thousand, but just the ones that have accumulated, that weren’t from the library or read on an e-reader, or lent to someone and never returned.
Sometimes minor books picked up from the piles left on the street. Cambridge, my beloved city, is awash in old books. The used bookstores are mostly gone but the books are still sloshing around in cardboard boxes on street-corners, in little libraries, in thrift stores.
There was a time when I haunted bookstores, and looked at all the new books, looking for new books by the authors I read, because I grew up in a time and a place where such information wasn’t effortlessly acquired. And I looked through old books, because why not, they’re cheap and I’d discover old books by an author I was interested in. Partial bibliographies in the front and back–generally of books by the same publisher.
The lurid covers of these paperbacks burned themselves into memory, and even for books I never read, I have this fondness, this love. Oh, I intended to read this! But should I read it now? Probably not. It won’t help my writing now. But I think about reading them anyway and seldom get around to it.
I grew up in a house of hundreds of books, that came and went, and SF magazines and the New Yorker. Reading the cartoons in the New Yorker made you feel sophisticated when you were ten years old. Hell, I still feel sophisticated reading them. God they’re good.
I lived in a time that now feels almost monastic. Four channels of TV. Three in focus. Commercial radio. A handful of first run movie theaters.
Kids these days wonder how the hell did we make ourselves read The Lord of the Rings?
For one thing, we grew up in this almost silence. You had your ten or twenty record albums, your tape collection… and that was it. Matlock was on, and you didn’t want to watch it, and it was a mile on the bike to the movie theater and nothing was good there most of the time and it was rated R and you could read your whole comic collection in a matter of hours and you did, you reread it over and over again, but sooner or later, you were bound for middle Earth.
I write this as a middle aged white dude in his fifties, one of the usual over-represented suspects, but maybe this is useful, to know how this happened, how we ended up in middle earth in part because we had nowhere else to go.
The suburbs were tender traps. Our parents had given up on religion. There were no street gangs to join. There was no culture to speak of that included you. Eventually there would be big name concerts from big name acts and trips to big cities to see big museums and see a play or two but mostly, we lived in this aching void.
We loved the Brady Bunch. Watch one of those things. Try to imagine how the hell anyone could love that show. Try to imagine that kid.
The Viet Nam War is winding down and nobody was gonna send my generation to war anytime soon and the sixties become the seventies and the seventies are ashamed they aren’t the sixties, unaware of how utterly worthless the 80s will be. How well they will be remembered.
Long story… long. We had books. Paperbacks. Full of futures.
Dark futures.
Other Worlds.
And bright futures of the past, a past that felt long ago to us, because we were young, but which were really only a few heartbeats back; the heady lunacy of the post-war American boom.
We had more current dark and weird and fucked up futures of the seventies, full of overpopulation and drugs and fear of totalitarian communist takeover. And sidewise jaunts into fantasy worlds that were full and complete and replete with meaning, with risk, with adventure and reward.
We made up a new kind of game, because of Lord of the Rings. Dungeons and Dragons. So we could pretend to live in that world all the fucking time. To escape from the weirdly safe silence of the suburbs, the streets without sidewalks, the cities with no mass transit, the car-based worlds that kids couldn’t traverse, that left us stranded in subdivisions with some random assemblage of kids from the block, poking through undeveloped land, playing in construction sites, climbing water towers. Roaming freely through a world we knew couldn’t hurt us, even when it could.
And we read books. A book a day, if you were a nerd like me who didn’t do sports and who had grown weary of the Brady Bunch and the Partridge Family. If you were depressed and didn’t like school, you could manage a paperback a night if you stayed up to four. You’d be a zombie the next day and who cared?
Your books and your vinyl and the people you shared them with defined you. Comics and a few shows and movies too, but so few. So few. Star Trek. Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star wars. Alien and Bladerunner. Every one of these will send a solid shiver up your spine if you came from when I did, where I did.
And the future? It was going to be post apocalyptic, or a post capitalist utopia spread amongst the stars. Asimov’s foundation or 1984 or Soylent green. Niven’s Known Space, but not Heinlein’s retro-futuristic history already falling out of sync with reality as he was writing books set on Lowel’s Mars, the one with Canals, long after such a wonder had been banished by the Mercury probes.
The solar system was cold and dead and only of academic interest and the stars were impossibly far away. The steaming jungles of venus and the canals of mars and the caves of methane ice of Jupiter’s moons were all pulp fictional destinations that never were and never could be.
So we languished in the bowels of a giant computer in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Decked out in bondage gear in the Road Warrior. In a few years we’d be jacked into an anarchocapitalist hell which some saw as a lovely thing indeed, but in those fading days of the first and second flowerings of the future, from the Jetsons to the Hip-trip millions of Stand on Zanizbar, we looked forward to the future with a perfect mix of dread and hope. Electric fear and sybaritic pleasure of world-cities and robot companions and immortality serums, alien encounters, strange new worlds to find and conquer.
Stacks of yellowing paperbacks now, stacked around me high and deep.
The future lurking with sharpened teeth in the dark. The eco-apocalypse refined. The cyber apocalypse omnipresent. The libertarian dream laying waste to the free world. The socialist utopia as dead as the dodo. The singularity beckoning. Post humanism looms.
And we come back to Frodo, and the ring, and the final hope, to turn away from something that will devour and destroy us, in these old and hard to read books by some old white guy who was shattered by WW1 and who put the world back together on the page and who tried to find a escape from a prison planet growing all around him.
And I am Rip Van Winkle, a boy who fell asleep after cavorting with the fairies and woke up with a white beard aching on this hillside. Having never found the ability or the need to put aside childish things.
Wondering what world to build next, in my tiny blip of electrons spinning in the cloud.
My comic book heroes stand astride the world; the game I played with dice and graph paper now fills a bazillion computers. The computer net we dreamed into being is unleashing monsters from the Id. The catastrophe we have been eagerly awaiting is unfolding around us. Finally here as the frogs go silent and the insects disappear. The technology needed to save us is booting up, but it will require a bloody revolution to derail this hell bound train.
And I hope I live to see it, the mirage shimmer on the horizon rising up all around me, the future revealed. The darkness full of diamonds. The cracks of doom ablaze. The one ring spinning into oblivion.
The world saved.
Living the dream, making new worlds, forever and ever.
Amen.
