In 1965 my old brother Allen’s bedroom was a permanent Katrina level disaster area. Underwear, comic books, sheet music, homework, Fritos ™ and other miscellaneous flotsam swirled in an ever-growing pile of kidcrap. I suspected our two missing gerbils had somehow been swallowed up by the maelstrom.
It was from this pile that I stole Mindswap, a science-fiction novel by Robert Sheckley. Allen would never notice. He had around three hundred other books sent to him by the Double Day Science Fiction Book Club. Every month Double Day sent him two books on the theory that someday he would send them a check.
Well, so much for theory.
Allen was away that Saturday morning for his weekly tuba lesson and had left his bedroom door open. You couldn’t help but look in: his room was an accident rapidly unfolding in front of your eyes. The book’s cover illustration caught my attention immediately. It showed a human (or humanoid) face slowly morphing into a Martian countenance. You see, you could tell it was a Martian’s head because it had pointed ears. After safely removing the book to my bedroom, I read the synopsis on the inside flap.
Hmmmmm. A human being switches brains with an alien. Intriguing.
That was my first, unassigned, solely voluntary reading-for-pleasure novel, ever. I was thirteen years old. I became a book addict at that instant. From that point on a book has never left my fingertips.
I grabbed up all the Sheckley books I could find (The Game of X, Untouched by Human Hands, The People Trap) and devoured them whole. I read other science fiction authors in quick succession: Blish, Bradbury, Asimov, Heinlein, Simak, Tenn, Clarke. Most of these paperbacks were purchased from the twirl-around-rack at the Majestik Pharmacy. Supply was limited but I wasn't choosey. Eventually no book was safe. My mother once left Potok’s The Chosen on the coffee table. In two days I sucked it dry.
Of all the authors I read during that period, Robert Sheckley remained my personal favorite. Perhaps it was because of Mindswap. I don’t know. He always seemed to be writing just for me. His stories generally had a humorous angle and a twist at the end. And the science fiction element seemed to add just the right optimistic touch. In the turmoil of the Sixties I was relieved that someone actually thought the human race had a future let alone one populated with rocket ships and robots.
That August my family loaded up the Galaxy 500 and we headed south to spend a week at Cumberland Mountain State Park in Tennessee. Unfortunately I was forced to ride the hump most of the way. As I sat there cramped in the fetal position between Allen and Lowell I decided to break the monotony of the trip by engaging in my new hobby: reading aloud from almanacs. I had brought along my Reader’s Digest Almanac just for this occasion.
Did anyone know what movie won the best picture of the year in 1952? No? I told them. What about the capital of Bolivia? Or the population of Kenya? Before we had even reached the Ohio border, by a vote of four to one, my almanac was tossed from the car and onto the highway median strip.
Our vacation was pretty standard. We rented a cabin in the woods for the week and intended to enjoy ourselves by making our lives just a little bit more miserable. Instead of watching television, we listened to hillbilly music on the radio. Instead of grocery shopping at Kroger, we allowed ourselves to be ripped off by the nearby general store. And instead of our real friends, we socialized with headache inducing strangers who we had never met before and never would meet again.
There was swimming and hiking most days. In the evening we listened to Hank Williams wanna-bes while Dad popped popcorn. Everywhere there was the perpetual trill of locusts. But what I remember most is reading Sheckley by flashlight and thinking about the future.
That future, of course, never happened. When the year two thousand rolled around there were only a few robots and just a couple space shuttles. Even the bad stuff didn’t happen. No invasions. No world destroying meteorites. No soylent green. The sad truth is that technological change is largely incremental. Science fiction is simply that: fiction.
Even without time travel, aliens, Martian colonies and genetic mutants, the human race somehow is still here. There is room for hope.
And that’s something.
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My Favorite Books
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