I went to a reading at the Trident bookstore with one of my writing workshops, and was introduced to the author, a woman twenty years younger than I was, as the old guy who knew all the old plots and premises from all the old books.
I wanted to be known as the guy selling a lot of stories, right now, to Asimov’s and Analog and F&SF, but as nobody in that workshop was selling to these places, that wasn’t my top line. So I sputtered something to that effect, that I was publishing, and after some awkwardness, went away, as, you know, I was twenty years older than everyone else and my career wasn’t big enough to justify my, eh, oldness.
In this group I was one of two old white guys; one was Jewish, and thus, not really white, so, really, I was the old-het-cis-white guy. There was one of them. Me, I mean.
I get how annoying I was, or rather, how annoying intoning about the 1000 old books might be.
For every ‘original’ idea I could find a precedent or three from the unread canon; I hope I went on to say that modern takes on old tropes are valid, important, but I learned this more deeply as the years rolled by.
A brilliant idea, premise, stuck in with period racism, sexism, any ism, doesn’t redeem the text to modern readers. It is the joyful job of every generation to write its own science-fiction. Increasingly, it’s the job of every racial and sexual identity to write its own science fiction. Time travel and clones and galactic empires and aliens and dystopia and sentient robots and all the trillion possible near futures radiating from every moment, every headline, every now.
I remember the title of Leonard Nimoy’s two biographies.
I am not Spock.
And then, after he’d gotten over himself a bit…
I am Spock.
I remember vividly opening a door into a room at a SF convention with this group of younger writers, having them catch a glimpse of the balance of white beards, middle aged paunches, baggy-eyes, and turning with them to flee the room en masse, without realizing what it was we were running away from.
This roomful of men that looked just like me.
I think of my father and I, and how we grew up reading stuff by folks 10 or 20 years older than us… But I realize, now, I’m 30 years older than a person in their mid-twenties… Only a year or two younger than the boomers who said never trust anyone over 30 who are now furious at people saying never trust anyone over sixty.
So. I am collecting the Ballentine Best of single author collections, books printed in the 70s about the authors of the 30s, 40s, 50s.
They are old. They smell. They are yellowed around the edges. They are, ‘age toned.’ Some of them are scarred, beat up, inscribed, stained. The world, the market these stories were written for, no longer exists. They are the precious canon of an aging cadre of misfits and neuro atypical proto-geeks, nerds from before the word nerd was invented.
They were also read by BIPOC folks and women and sexual minorities who seldom saw themselves reflected in these books, explicitly, but who were still enthralled by the storytelling, by the old fashioned sense of wonder, by the capacious, audacious dreams of the post war boom.
I am age toned. I smell. I am beat up.
I am filled with dreams. I have seen things you people wouldn’t believe. You remember how that goes. I’ll say it again anyway. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. C-beams glitter in the darkness.
My incept date is unknown; but it’s approaching. I can sense it creeping up on me, now, that my parents are gone. I feel like Rip Van Winkle, but of course, every single person my age feels like Rip Van Winkle.
I am a yellowed mass-market paperback, full of dreams, laying on the curb awaiting the first rainstorm which will melt me into oblivion.
I am that book hoping to be picked up and perused.
A few more times at least.
Be orthogonal.