Even though I was always interested in science fiction, I really never read very widely. I honestly cannot think of anything I read which was not connected to a TV show or movie (e.g. Star Trek, 2001, Hitchhikers Guide). After I started playing D&D I veered off into fantasy, which was most of my fiction reading for many years. As I have gotten older I have found that my diet of mainly non-fiction books was hard to maintain, so I now always try to have two books in progress: one non-fiction, and one fiction, when I get tired of reading the former, I will read the latter. This is a good strategy and has increased how many books I am able to get through. As such I have started reading older classic science fiction, many from Appendix N.
I don’t remember how, but a few years ago I happened upon the works of Clifford Simak. I read The Way Station and really liked it. It felt different from so much science fiction, it had a meditative pace and focused on the characters rather than on gadgets and guns. It was a beautiful story and I felt better having read it.
As I was looking through his other books I noticed The Goblin Reservation and that name rang a bell. I know I saw that name before. Then I remembered…
The first time I played D&D the DM put the giant map of the City State of the Invincible Overlord onto the table. That map was full of delicious details, and I wanted to be there. At that moment I was hooked on D&D. I studied every detail on that map, so, even after all these years, I remembered an odd detail: the area on the map labeled “goblin reservation”. Given that Simak’s book was published 8 years earlier, this cannot be a coincidence, I suspect that is an “Easter egg” and a homage to Simak. If anyone has any evidence to back up this conjecture, I am all ears.
I have just finished the book and it was a fun read. Simak clearly did not believe in the division between science fiction and fantasy, and he gleefully mixed them all up, but somehow still kept it a believable, compelling story. This mashup reminded me of some D&D adventures with similar genre jumbles, like the classic Expedition to the Barrier Peaks or some Judges Guild adventures.
Yet another coincidence is that Simak was born the same year as my grandmother, and both of them had fathers who emigrated from Bohemia. Further, he was born and raised in the same county where my grandmother also spent her early years (from 1910 to 1926) about 30 miles away from each other. Furthermore, when I saw his photo on Wikipedia, I was immediately saw a resemblance to my uncles on the Czech side of the family. But on the other hand, his mother descends from early settlers in New England, and it appears we are 9th cousins, maybe less. In the course of finding that, I noticed that one of his great uncles lived in Lake Geneva, WI.
So for all these reasons, I feel an odd connection with Simak, and his works will be on my to read list for some time. Let me know what I should read next.
I am deeply saddened by the news that Leonard Nimoy has passed away. Some of my earliest memories of childhood were watching the original series. The show was on every weekend and I watched it religiously. Spock was my childhood hero. I wanted to be just like him: incredibly smart, calm and unflappable in the face of any catastrophe. When being smart and idolizing such a character earned me the scorn and ridicule of my peers, he taught me not to let my emotions get the best of me. Though I never so much mastered my emotions as bottled them up. But I think Spock grappled with that as well.
I remember when Star Wars came out, and, like the other kids my age, I was infatuated with it. But when Star Trek: The Motion Picture came out 2 years later I began to see that the beauty of science fiction is not in the fancy gadgetry or the heroic space battles, but rather it is a way to put people in alien circumstances and explore what that does to one’s humanity (for better or for worse). See humanity and the world in a different light, and, hopefully, think about how to make each a bit better. I think Star Trek did that better than any other sci-fi franchise.
I lived for a number of years without a TV, and just recently started watching some of the various Star Trek series (my favourite being Voyager) with my wife. I started noticing a theme that runs through almost every part of the Star Trek franchise: there is always a character who is trying to come to terms, in some way, with what it means to be human. Data, Seven of Nine, The Doctor, T’Pol, Odo and the original template, Spock. Like all of us, Spock had to grapple with a part of himself that he wasn’t comfortable with, but, ultimately turned out to be an essential part of who he was. What is more human than that?
This is expressed the best in Kirk’s eulogy: “Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most… human.”