National Science Fiction Day

The Pulps in the Mailbox

National Science Fiction Day falls on January 2, the birthday of Isaac Asimov, one of the giants of the genre. For me it’s close to a personal holiday, because science fiction is where my whole life as a reader began.

It started with the pulps. The old science fiction magazines, Astounding, Fantastic, and the rest, arrived in my mailbox every month, and they were wonders. At one point I subscribed to six or seven of them at once. They piled up into something amazing to look at, two or three bookshelves stacked double and even triple deep with magazines full of strange new worlds. Each month brought another batch, and the waiting was half the pleasure.

I got rid of them all eventually, because it became too much to keep, and I don’t have a single one anymore. But that mountain of magazines is where I learned to love stories.

That’s where it started. Where it got serious was a box of someone else’s things.

Stranger in a Strange Land, Read in a Weekend

When my great-aunt died, the family received a couple of boxes of her things. In one of them was a copy of Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. I grabbed it.

I read it cover to cover in a single weekend, completely absorbed. At the time it was a totally different viewpoint than anything I’d encountered, a whole way of looking at the world I had never considered, wrapped in a story I couldn’t put down.

I loved it. That book is the one that turned science fiction from a stack of fun magazines into something that could change how a person thinks.

A novel inherited by accident, from a relative I barely knew, rearranged how I saw the world over the course of two days.

From there it was a flood. Jack Vance, whose short story “The Narrow Land” ran in one of those magazines, was incredible, that strange, vivid imagination working at full power.

Years later, in the eighties, I found Roger Zelazny’s Amber series and fell just as hard. I could go on for an hour naming them. The point is that one inherited paperback opened a door that never closed.

Why Science Fiction Earns More Respect Than It Gets

People dismiss science fiction as kid stuff, spaceships and ray guns and nothing serious underneath. They’re wrong, and Stranger in a Strange Land is the proof.

The best science fiction is a laboratory for real questions. You take a hard idea about being human, freedom, identity, what we owe each other, what power does to people, and you build a world in which you can run the experiment cleanly.

Strip away the familiar and you can see the question better. Heinlein used a man raised on Mars to ask what’s natural about how humans live. That’s philosophy with a better delivery system.

That’s what the genre gave me, and what I try to do in my own science fiction now. Underneath the spaceships, the good stuff is asking the oldest questions there are, just from an angle close enough to strange that you finally see them fresh.

How do you spend National Science Fiction Day?

Read some science fiction, and pick something with ideas in it. The genre is enormous, so there’s a door for everyone.

If you want a starting point, the classics deserve their reputation.

Heinlein for the big human questions, Asimov for the ideas, Vance for sheer imagination, Zelazny for style. If you already read the genre, push into a corner of it you’ve ignored. And if you’ve never given it a real shot because you think it’s silly, find one well-regarded novel and read it with an open mind.

You may discover what I discovered in a single weekend with an inherited paperback, that science fiction at its best is some of the most serious storytelling there is, hiding behind a rocket ship on the cover.

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