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Early Days - My First Years with SF

I was born on 7th December, 1960, in the city of Derry, in Northern Ireland, where I’ve lived my entire life. I’ve been a science fiction fan since a very early age, with the foundations being laid at about age 3-4 years old, when I started to read my first “proper” books (books with lots of words, rather than mere “picture books”). These early books were full of dinosaurs, spaceships and stories of other worlds, all of which captivated my fertile young imagination. So the influences and obsessions of a future SF fan had already been laid down right from the start.

I started reading comics at about age 4-5 years, and was already developing a strong preference for the more SF-oriented strips. The classic Doctor Who on British television started having its first influence on me about 1966-67, when I was about 6 years old, and at about roughly the same time my life was changed forever when I saw the classic George Pal movie adaption of The Time Machine on Irish television (RTE). I was now a confirmed SF nut, at least as far as comics, films and television were concerned.

As a direct result of this obsession with The Time Machine movie and Doctor Who, I was also to start reading SF. About a year or two after I’d seen the movie, I found Wells’s The Time Machine in a local library, and I just had to read it. I was hooked, despite the drastic differences between the novel and the movie, and moved from there on to reading anything else I could find by Wells, then on to Verne, Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein and the greater world of SF authors at large. My dad hated all this silly “sci-fi nonsense” and hoped desperately that I’d “grow out of it” as I got older. But here I am, forty years later, and still a hardcore SF fan. Poor Dad!

The Golden Years - SF in My Teens

As I moved into my teens, I devoured every SF book that came my way, sometimes reading two or even three books per day when I was on a roll. This was the period in my life in which I read the largest volume of SF, before I started university (at 18), when the heavy studies began severely curtailing any other form of reading. It was during this time that I developed my love for short fiction (much easier to read than large novels when you have little free time for reading), as most of the books that I read were SF anthologies and collections. That strong preference for reading short fiction has persisted to this day, and 95% of the material I read is short stories. I still enjoy the occasional good novel, though.

My SF reading declined sharply during my university years, at least in sheer amount, and never regained its former glory. But I still kept reading, even if in smaller amounts. Adult life, work, socializing, and getting into a steady relationship with a woman who considered reading an “anti-social activity” (i.e.: it stopped me paying attention to her) limited my free time to such an extent that it’s a wonder I managed to get any reading done at all (I must have my own personal time turner, like the one Hermione had in Harry Potter III). Free time became even scarcer after 1991, when I became a dad, and even more since the end of 1995, when I became an internet junkie. You can’t be a parent, an obsessive web surfer, and still read huge amounts at the same time. There aren’t enough hours in the day, so something’s got to give.

The Internet Years 1995 to Present

My love affair with the internet started when I first came online at 4.55am on Christmas morning, December 1995, becoming a member of the SFMEDIA forum on Compuserve. I moved quickly on to the SFLIT forum, which I liked even better. I became an online junkie, and spent the next few years quite at home on these two Compuserve SF forums before moving out into the wilds of the internet, after I left Compuserve and moved to a different ISP. But I’ve always retained a deep fondness for my first online home, and I still go back regularly to visit my old buddies in the SFLIT forum.

Online SF forums and websites are a huge part of my life now, but one major drawback of being an online junkie is that it eats in a big way into your reading time. Between that, being a parent, working, and all the other vices of adult “real life”, my once prodigious flood of reading material dwindled to something more like a small stream. But I’ve always kept plugging away, particularly with the short fiction, which is much easier to digest as you can sneak in a short story or two when you have a half-hour break.

I became an expert at squeezing out every spare moment for reading - during tea and lunch breaks, over breakfast and dinner, during visits to the bathroom, and just before going to sleep. Even the stories I read to my son were a part of this - the Harry Potter and Artemis Fowl novels (among many others) at one chapter a night entertained me just as much as they did him. For all those people who say they have no time to read, I say: “Rubbish! Where there’s a will there’s a way”.

My reading has begun increasing in volume again since the tragic and premature death of my son, my only child, on 19th April 2006, at the very tender age of just 14 years and nine months, after months battling cancer. I loved that kid more than life itself, and his loss, as well as the cruel and protracted manner of his death, have absolutely devastated me, just ripped my heart and insides to shreds and flushed them down the toilet. I can’t even begin to describe the unbelievable pain and grief, even now, a year after his death. There just aren’t any words strong enough.

Only two or three things seem to ease the pain a little, even if only temporarily - computers/internet, music and reading. So I’ve begun throwing myself into all three with wild abandon, as some kind of therapy, a form of pain relief. Nothing can take the pain away totally, but these old staunch favourites, have become a vital part of my “survival kit”, a collection of those small but vital things that are helping me hang on in there, helping to fill the emptiness a little and giving me back some sort of focus in life, rather than giving in to the incredibly powerful urge to just “give up” and go off the deep end.

This blogging lark is the newest tool in my survival kit. As I write this, I am literally the newest of newbies, a complete virgin in the blogosphere. Until I installed WordPress in the small hours of this morning, I’d never so much as looked at blogging software, although I had been considering trying it for various reasons, as an alternative to a traditional website.

Maybe getting my thoughts online regularly will help as another form of therapy, I don’t know. But as I’m planning a content-intensive blog, I know that it’ll at the very least keep me busy, stop me from having too much time to brood, and give me a regular focus for my energies and thoughts.

Only time will tell, but I’m game to give it a go. Here’s hoping!