Light On Dark Water

Sunday Night Journal — January 11, 2011

Until I was sixteen or so, and began working for my uncle on
the family farm, my summers were very idle and isolated. We didn’t live within
walking distance of any of my school friends, so they only other young people
around were my siblings and cousins, and there was a limit to how much time we
wanted to spend together. I read a great deal, mostly fairly simple stuff that
I went through quickly. So it was very important that I have a steady supply of
books.

Into my life one wonderful day came a very wonderful thing:
the bookmobile. I believe it was at school that I first encountered it—I don’t
recall our little school having a library—but it was most important to me when
it stopped near our house in the summer. It occurs to me now that I don’t know
where it came from, that is, which library. The phrase “Wheeler Basin Regional
Library” floats into my mind. I don’t remember a specific library by that name,
so perhaps it was a consortium of libraries. The region in general was (is)
known as the Tennessee (River) Valley, and Wheeler Lake was the nearest of the
many lakes created by hydroelectric dams built on the Tennessee by the
Tennessee Valley Authority, a federal agency born of the New Deal.

But it doesn’t matter. As far as I was concerned, the
bookmobile seemed to have fallen from heaven. It was a sort of van or panel
truck with closed sides and folding windowed doors, like those on buses, at the
front and rear on one side. I believe it was air-conditioned; at any rate it
had, in the burning Alabama summers, a cool look, with blue-green glass in the
doors and blue-green carpet on the floor. Was there also a sort of skylight of
the same tinted glass? I’m not sure, but the interior was well-lit. The side
walls…and perhaps the rear?…were lined with wooden bookshelves.

Every few weeks—or at some interval which seemed very long
to me—in the summer, the bookmobile arrived in Greenbrier and parked in the
east end of the parking lot of Greenbrier Barbecue. Our house was about a
quarter-mile away, across an open pasture, and from the porch or the yard I
could just make out the bookmobile as a gleam that was not normally there. (I
want to say it was blue-white, which makes me think perhaps there really was a
skylight.) On the day it was due to arrive I watched for it with a
near-Christmas level of excitement.

It was in the bookmobile on one of its summer visits that I
first encountered science fiction, when the mere title on the spine of a book
caught my attention: Citizen of the Galaxy. Those words did something to
me, came to me as a sort of call, suggesting distance and mystery. I no longer
remember anything at all of the plot beyond a vague picture of a young man
having adventures across the galaxy. But I was enchanted, and looked for more
books like it. The name of the author, Robert Heinlein, meant nothing to me.
And I don’t think I knew the term “science fiction.” But I looked for more
books like it, more books involving space travel, the distant future and its
technological marvels, and the magical strangeness of alien worlds. Citizen
of the Galaxy was soon followed by Rocket to Limbo, by Alan E.
Nourse, and Star Gate, by André Norton.

This was the beginning of a sort of love affair that went on
for several years. I read all the science fiction I could get my hands on,
including novels and stories by all the big names of the genre prior to 1965 or
so—Heinlein, Clarke, Bradbury, Asimov—and others less well-known outside of
sci-fi fandom: A.E. van Vogt, Damon Knight, James Blish, Frederick Pohl, Poul
Anderson, and Clifford Simak are some of the names I remember, though I cannot
now name a single work by any of them.

One day my mother took some of us children with her (not her
normal practice) when she went to shop at the Post Exchange on the army base in
Huntsville, a privilege afforded by my father’s service in World War II. The PX
had a bigger selection of magazines than I had ever seen, and in browsing it I
had something like a repeat of my bookmobile experience. I saw the cover of a
magazine called Analog: Science Fact – Science Fiction. I snatched it
up, bought it, and read it in total fascination. Not only was it full of great
stories, it was full of what seemed to me very sophisticated and fascinating
ideas, including a certain amount of hard science and what I now see to be some
fairly ordinary empirical philosophical talk. But the empiricism itself (of
course I didn’t know the word) was appealing to me, because it was an attempt
to question and understand the world rationally. I immediately subscribed to Analog,
and soon afterward joined the Science Fiction Book Club, which I saw advertised
in the magazine.

Some time after my conversion to atheism, my mother and
older sister and I were on a long drive at night—I forget the
circumstances—and, as it often does in that situation, when there is nothing
else to do, the talk turned toward weighty matters: religion, morality, the
meaning of it all. They must have been challenging my anti-religious views,
because one of the two or three specific things I recall from this conversation
is my sister asserting that “Mac’s problem is he reads too much science
fiction.” I was so astonished by this, and thought it so entirely stupid, that
I could only laugh.  

But thinking back on it now, I believe she had a point. Science
fiction had not in any way persuaded me to atheism, but had abetted the process
in a subtle way, by providing me with an alternative means of investing the
mundane world with mystery, wonder, and significance. For as long as I can
remember I have wanted to believe that the world we see around us is not all
there is, and that somehow one ought to be able to escape it for a better one. Science
fiction gave me a substitute for the supernatural in which I had ceased to
believe. Its imagined future and alien civilizations were marvelous enough to
fascinate me, but they didn’t require believing in the implausible God. I could
in fact believe, or at least hope, that something like them really was out
there somewhere in space and time. In its appeal to reason, imagination, and
hope, it was like a cheap imitation of the Catholic faith.

The magic lasted for only a few years, though. By the time I
was a senior in high school I was growing bored with science fiction, its
marvels beginning to seem drab and rickety, with some very mundane machinery
visible behind the fanciful scenery, like the sight of a Mardi Gras float
sitting still in broad daylight, so that you can’t avoid noticing that it’s
only a sort of crude sculpture sitting on a truck, or a movie theater with all
the lights on.