Thank You, Science Fiction, For Spoiling My Childhood

As seen on Leigh Reyes--My Life As A Verb, Thank You, Science Fiction, For Spoiling My Childhood. An excerpt:

I can’t read regular fiction. I’ve tried. I don’t care if it’s won a Booker. I turn the page and there’s this guy meeting his literary agent in a bar, and I wait for the Deleutherian delegation in their lightgrav suits, but they never appear.

Thank you, science fiction, for spoiling my childhood.

Thank you for making me want to die on the moon when I was 8 years old. The first science fiction story I read was Requiem. It was in a book without a cover, a book a grandaunt’s friend had brought home from the Clark Air Base library. In Requiem, a man dies on the moon, alone. I didn’t understand why, but I thought it was grand. “Home is the sailor, home from sea / and the hunter home from the hill.”

Thank you for making me disobey my mother. We were not allowed to watch TV on school nights. I broke the rule for Star Trek.

Thank you for encouraging me to copy Ray Bradbury. Oh, how I wanted to write like him, all run-on sentences and mysterious inhalations, little green men and wicked prognostications, sipping dandelion wine and munching golden apples until my belly ached and my fingers were sticky-sad with late October and someone else’s word-and-world whimsy.

Thank you for making me over-confident in my numeracy. I had read so much about interstellar warp drives that I really believed I could calculate how to make one work. (This explains why I hold no grudge towards my trigonometry, algebra and calculus teachers.)

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