|
Thursday, October 23, 2008
We pray for one last landing
On the globe that gave us birth
Let us rest our eyes on the fleecy skies
and the cool, green hills of earth.
If you've read the words of the immortal Robert A. Heinlein, it's likely that those words will bring a stirring to your spirit. Maybe they'll remind you of your youth and all the hope, wonder and optimism that most of us know as youngsters.
My first favorite writer was Heinlein, and though I never met the man, I feel an enormous debt to him. I always considered Robert A. Heinlein to be my true father. I know that I learned far more from him than I did the man I was sired by. The most important things in life are conveyed in pointed and precise language in Heinlein's books: Love, honor, duty, hope.
In those days, kids wanted to grow up to be astronauts, not some kind of geeky game designers. Well, I like to think that most of them did, but now that I look back with more clarity, it seems that the majority of the boys, the ones with less imagination, wanted to be sports professionals. But I dreamed of the stars. At least when I wasn't shivering over monsters.
Some of the greatest reading memories of my life were with Mr. Heinlein's books. I recall one time quite clearly. I suppose I was around eleven or twelve years of age:
My mother was not what you'd call a good cook. I thought that 'home cooking' was some kind of a joke and I much preferred packaged or frozen food. One of my favorites was Rice-a-Roni, as embarrassed as that makes me now. So that one day I had the house to myself and I was letting a luscious pan of The San Francisco Treat absorb its water and flavor pack and I was reading Farmer in the Sky. That twenty minutes or so seemed to take forever, because I was so hungry, but the book I was reading captivated me. I got so caught up in the exploits of young Bill Lermer and his pioneer family.
The story is fairly routine. Bill and his widowed father and brand-new wife decide to leave the overcrowded Earth and emigrate to Ganymede. For those that slept through their Science classes, Ganymede is one of the moons of Jupiter. Bill and his family embark on the spaceship which transports them to the fledgling colony on Ganymede. There they meet various hardships and discover the challenges of making a home and farm on the terraformed moon. But is nothing routine about Heinlein's storytelling. It is captivating. Bill is a remarkable young man who faces his obsticles and becomes a man in the process. Tragedy strikes on more than one occasion, but Bill learns to love his new home.
Farmer in the Sky is one of Heinlein's YA books, or as we called them back in the day, Juvenile Novels. These books may seem to be corny by jaded, quasi-intellectuals, but to individuals with some heart left in their chests, they are breathtaking and they represent that old sense of wonder more than any other books I've read. Period.
One especially poignant moment in Farmer in the Sky is when Bill tries to cheer up his family during the frigid dark phase Winter by banging out some songs on his accordian. When he plays The Green Hills of Earth, he realizes that it was the wrong time for such a nostalgic sentiment. Not during the long nights of seemingly endless cold.
My favorites of his work are the Juveniles and my favorites of the Juveniles are Farmer in the Sky and Starman Jones. I've lost count of how many times I've read these magnificent books and I'll continue to revisit them until I die.
The Green Hills of Earth is one of the keynote pieces in Heinlein's celebrated "Future History Stories", most of which are assembled in his The Past Though Tomorrow collection. He documented an entire history of events that his fiction would chronicle, from the near (1950's) present to the far flung future where humankind effortlessly traveled the cosmos. Simply put, science fiction gets no better than than Heinlein when he was on his game.
I remember one night in May 1988. I took the current issue of Time Magazine into the Reading Room for my evening constitutional. I read the terrible, unbelievable news and came out of the bathroom with tears in my eyes. My then-girlfriend looked startled and asked what was wrong. I choked out, "Heinlein died!". She kind of said, "Oh", like it was nothing. Nothing! It was like hearing that God died. To me, Robert Anson Heinlein was Lazarus Long and it didn't make sense that he had died. It didn't and it still doesn't.
|
|
Sunday, October 05, 2008
The 1960's are remembered for many things. Hippies, political upheaval, rock and roll music, explosive revolutions in literature and film, a war almost as unpopular as the one we're currently in. But I look back on that decade as a time for monsters.
Monsters were big then. The Universal movies were getting played on TV all the  time. There were monster models, monster models, monster cartoons, monster record albums, monster sitcoms, monster cereals. Most of the bigger towns had horror movie hosts and the ones that didn't have their own got them broadcast in from other places. And Famous Monsters of Filmland was on the stands of the cooler magazine retailers. Oujia Boards were incredibly popular.
I was at a mini-horror con yesterday in Chesapeake, Virginia. It is a cool little event called MonsterFest and it is done by the library system. The people behind it seem pretty damned cool and they went all out. Attendance was sparse though.  The people that did come were wonderful, but there should have been more. In my youth, had there been a free show dedicated to horror and monsters, it would have been packed. I guess the kids have too much to do with their X Boxes and wiis and what-the-fuck-ever game systems they have. And possibly parents were 'too busy' to take them.
I know that time s change, but do they always have to change for the worse?
Just about every kid I knew was a monster fan. We'd excitedly discuss the movies we watched over the weekends and imitate the jokes that the horror hosts made. Even if, especially if, they were corny jokes. A few parents disapproved of horror movies and comics, but happily, there didn't seem to be many. Not like today's New Christians who want to deprive their kids the fun of Halloween. Fun that the vast majority of them enjoyed in their own youths. Fucking hypocrites.
I remember when I was in elementary school, there was a book in the library called Terrors of the Screen. I saw a kid with it and I was transfixed. I wanted it so bad. He let me hold it for a  minute or two and, to me, it was like holding the Holy Grail. I got on the waiting list to borrow it, but I was low on it. I saw it around the school and I was jealous as hell of the lucky kids that had it. But I was never to have Terrors of the Screen for myself. I never got word from the library and I suppose that it was either lost, ruined by some disrespectful little snot, or perhaps some kid couldn't bear to give it up and kept it. I can certainly understand that. I later made up for the loss by using my saved allowance in 1973 to buy Denis Gifford's excellent A Pictorial History of Horror Films.
What happened? I don't expect today's kids to be the same as we were, but what of those that lived for monsters when they were kids? People from my generation? I'll tell you what happened: They lost the magic.
Like McCammon says in Boy's Life, we all start out knowing magic. As kids, we longed for there to be more to the world than school, parents and their humdrum jobs and the changing seasons. We turned to horror and science fiction to explore the possibilities of magic. Our logical minds might not have really believed in vampires, werewolves and giant insects, but in our souls, in our guts, we did. It was how we managed to survive the agonies of growing up.
How many of those Monster Boomers still have the love of horror in their hearts? Precious few, I think. Oh, I've brought up classic horror movies to my contemporaries and they'll usually get a sad smile on their faces. They can barely remember when they still believed. Now they tend to mock it.
If growing up means that I lose the passion for monsters, rocket ships, dinosaurs, giant bugs, then I think I'll pass. Oh, I've been unable to avoid the terrible aging process and I've been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the world of responsibility. I'd probably be homeless if I hadn't. But I keep that magic part of my heart alive. When that dies, you lose your soul.
 Me at age 7, doing a Lon Chaney, Jr. impersonation.
|
| |
|
