Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Nothing political this time. At least I don’t think so. Y’never know, though, do you?

What I’d like to blather about this week is reading. And writing, I suppose. But mostly reading. See, when I was a kid my uncle started in on the brainwashing, dropping writers like Heinlein, Asimov, Pournelle, and their like on me. As I got older, so did the subject matter. This is where L. Neil, Koman, Pournelle with Niven (still the only collaborative duo that wrote above their already incredible solo standard when working together) and a couple of others. Like so many folks before me, I was dropped down a rabbit hole that I never have fully emerged from. Not that I’d want to.

I spent more years than I care to look back on reading and rereading the same dozen to so folks. Oh, there’d be brief times when I’d “Discover” someone new and devour their stuff, but in the end it was always the same people, drawing me back in, like friends or family. These stories were a mythology, these characters things from heroic tradition. I was always in good hands.

But here’s the problem: Most of the folks that shaped my mind at so formative a time are gone now. Heck, most of them were gone by the time I’d started reading them. If memory serves, I’d started in on Heinlein in ’89 or so, a year after his passing. Same with L’Amour. I was probably 13 when I started reading Asimov, and I’m fairly sure he was either gone by then, or on his way out. Niven and Pournelle stuck around—until Jerry died a bit ago—but their work together was few and far between, and Pournelle’s own solo output was never voluminous to start with. There were endless stories from Bradbury and Ellison, but even these dwindled by the time they met their maker, not that any of my local bookshops bothered to cary their stuff anyway. Likewise when I’d asked them to get in copies of missing books by J. Neil Schulman (whose Alongside Night I didn’t read until I was an adult, because I just couldn’t get the thing), or Victor Koman, whose books are so persona non grata that even my local library refuses to handle them. (I’ve asked them why on numerous occasions, but with no success; I gather that it’s not the decision of the librarians, themselves, but rather the over arching powers that be who want, above all else, to not offend the SJW’s.)

It really comes home for me that most of the writers that impacted me in my youth are gone. Most especially when I sit down to read with my kids. That’s what has kicked up all this dust in my mind.

Recently I started reading Asimov’s I, Robot to my girls. While surrounded by people who find robots to be anything from creepy to evil to downright demonic, my oldest hears Isaac’s words and her eyes light up. She wants to hear the stories. More, she needs to. I remember the feeling. That indefinable need to know what happens next, to the exclusion of all else. I envy them this time. I remember the first time I read “Robbie,” and that sense of wonder and awe at a story well-told can never be recaptured. The best we can hope for is to live it again by proxy through the eyes of our kids.

So then, to the question at the core of this short article: Who will they read?

As an adult, as I’ve stated already, I read mostly the same people that I read earlier in life. The same ones that my family read earlier in their lives. Is this to be the way of things? Has the medium of storytelling fallen so low that by the time my own kids are adults, reading to their own kids, that the best they can hope for is 80-100 year old science fiction stories written before their old man was born? True, there are still L. Neil, J. Neil, Koman, Koontz, Mike Baron, Sarah Hoyt, F. Paul Wilson, Chuck Dixon, and Graham Nolan (Yes, I’m name-dropping, but for a reason: if you don’t already read them, remedy that!), but they’re only a few people. We need more.

I write. Every nerd does, I think, whether it’s fan fiction or blogs or whatever. I write short novels and stories. They’re not great, but I like them. I wish to god that I could write something that someone could read, and say in later years that it was their favorite book. I don’t think I ever will. Not enough talent; not enough smarts. But I try my best. You can, too. I truly feel that everyone has at least one story in them. One thing that is distinctly their own. It could be a twenty word anecdote, to a thousand page opus. Doesn’t matter. Write. Create. Pour out your life’s blood onto the page. Leave it all out there on the street, with no shyness or regrets. It might not be great, but then again it might. So, create, for the sake of those that follow, as much for your own sake. Give them something to read that doesn’t suck. Remind them that there are still storytellers worth reading out there. Please, I’m begging you, not just for my kids and their kids, but for myself. Because sometimes it just feels too dark out there.

I'll mention a list of a few books I prepared recently: here—Editor