The Vorkosigan Companion by Lillian Stewart Carl, John Helfers Read Free Book Online Page A

book from the shelf. I fell ravenously on Walter Farley and Marguerite Henry (this was my horse-obsessed period), and never looked back. I started reading science fiction when I was nine, because my father read it—he used to buy Analog magazine and the occasional paperback to read on the plane during consulting trips. With that introduction, no one was ever going to fool me into thinking SF was kid stuff!
    LSC: Kid stuff?
    LMB: Well, one must admit, SF has roots in boys'-own-adventure genres; I dimly remember reading SFnal tales in my older brother's copies of Boy's Life (a Boy Scout magazine) back then. But the term "adolescent" when applied to SF is not necessarily a pejorative, in my later and wider view. The great psychological work of adolescence (in our culture, anyway) is to escape the family, especially the mother but in some families the father, depending on which parent is more intent on enforcing the social norms, in order to create oneself as an autonomous person. This is why, I theorize, so much fantasy and SF is so hell-bent on destroying the protagonist's family, first thing, before anything else. Villages must be pillaged and burned, lost heirs smuggled off to be raised elsewhere, SFnal social structures devised that eliminate family altogether—because before anything at all can happen, you have to escape your parents. It's their job to prevent you having adventures, after all.
    When I was a kid, my favorite writers included Poul Anderson and James H. Schmitz—who had great female leads in his tales—the usual Heinlein (the juveniles, not his later work), Asimov, and Clarke, Fritz Leiber, L. Sprague de Camp, Mack Reynolds, Eric Frank Russell, Zenna Henderson; toward the end of that period there was Anne McCaffrey, Randall Garrett, Roger Zelazny, Tolkien, Cordwainer Smith, and so on. There was a lot less SF on the library shelves in those days; you could read it all up, and I did.
    I discovered the SF sections at the public libraries I could occasionally get to. Since we lived on the outer edge of the suburbs, and there was no public transportation, getting to a library involved getting my mother to drive me the ten or twenty miles there, which became easier when I reached age sixteen and could drive myself.
    LSC: For a while you were getting around on a bicycle. That's devotion to reading, risking getting run off a narrow black-topped road in order to reach the library. But that was after I entered your life—or you entered mine—thanks to some faceless bureaucrat who put us both into Section 7-2 at Hastings Junior High School in Upper Arlington.
    LMB: Dear God, you even remember the section number? Scary . . . 
    LSC: Do you remember trying out for the school talent show by singing Tom Lehrer's "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park"? The silence after we finished could have swallowed a planet.
    LMB: I'm so glad we didn't make the cut. . . . The experience of making the attempt was likely good to have, I suppose. Maybe. Actually, I still don't like getting up on stage, come to think.
    LSC: It's a good thing we found each other—no one else could have put up with us. (Although I must admit to having been immensely gratified at sitting around a conference recently, singing Lehrer songs with the other writers!)
    LMB: Well, we didn't know fandom existed till after high school. In junior high we shared our love of books, watched favorite television shows and fell in love with their heroes together ( The Man from U.N.C.L.E.! Star Trek! The short-lived TV version of The Wackiest Ship in the Army! ), and became each other's first readers for the (mostly highly derivative) stories, scripts, and poetry that boiled up in both our heads—we were inspired to write because we loved to read, and because stories poured through our heads, welling up uninvited from wherever these thoughts come.
    I introduced you to SF and fantasy, and you introduced me to history and archaeology. This was the early 1960s, and American