SFreaders.com

Someone once said (I think it was Isaac Asimov) that the Golden Age of SF was when we were twelve years old (as opposed to the standard answer of “the few years after John W. Campbell took over at Astounding magazine”). And y’know something, he was spot on.

I remember those heady, distant days back when I was a kid with a fondness that measures about 10 on the Richter Scale. It’s an era, a feeling that I can never again recapture, no matter how hard I try. And I’ve tried, believe me.

I’m not saying that it was a glorious, pain-free time in my life. Quite the opposite, actually. My mother had walked out the year before and left my father alone to raise five kids. And, as the eldest of those five kids, I was suddenly promoted to position of “surrogate mother”, dad’s “right hand man”, with all the extra responsibilities and pressures that this entailed.

To make things worse, we lived in an extremely poor and deprived area in Northern Ireland at a time which was at the absolute height of “The Troubles”. Every day there was rioting, shootings, bombings, killings and other chaos of some sort. I remember one day, coming home on the school bus, and driving very slowly past the site of a bomb explosion where two would-be bombers had attempted to blow up a crowded supermarket. The bomb had exploded prematurely, killing only the two bombers. I remember the scene vividly. The bus, taking what seemed like an eternity to drive past the scene. Myself and a busload of other frightened kids, pale faces staring out the windows. Dismembered body parts littering the sidewalk, a severed arm here, a leg there, mutilated torsos and heads covered in blood-soaked sheets. Frighteningly, a fairly common occurrence in Northern Ireland back in those days.

Not exactly the stuff of a happy childhood, eh? But, in a way, I was happy, in my little parallel universe of science fiction (and comics), safely cocooned away from the horrors of “The Troubles” and an unhappy domestic life. It was my escape, my retreat from a troubled reality. In many ways it was my reality, and all the other bad stuff happened somewhere else, to someone else.

And, for an impoverished young lad like me, the local library was my lifeline. I was almost a permanent resident there. During the summer break, when I had no school studies to worry about, I used to go to the library, pick out six books, read them all in two or three days, and go back for another six books. Read those, and back for more. Ad infinitum. It was at this time that I was first discovering all the classic SF authors who really launched me head-first into my obsession with science fiction - Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, Anderson, Niven, and the multitude of other great writers regarded by all as fundamental pillars of the genre. It was also at this time that I developed my love for short fiction, as I started to read as many anthologies and collections as I did novels. To this very day, thirty-five years later, I still tend to prefer short fiction to novels.

I remember when the fancy new library opened up near to where I lived. It was huge, like an enormous airport terminal, except lined with shelves full of books. I was in heaven. The sheer number of books, and the vastly expanded SF&F section, were a marvel to behold. We’d waited so long for this, our previous library being only a tiny temporary building. I also remember the day, several months later, when this lovely new library was burned to the ground by brain-dead, rioting morons, most of whom had never read a book in their lives. Hell, most of them were so dumb they could barely write their own names. The library was never rebuilt. In a troubled hot-spot such as our neighbourhood it would only have been burned to the ground, again and again.

I cried that day, cried like a baby. I had grown so fond of books, of science fiction, that it felt as though I’d lost something really important in my life. The library, all those books, burning in an enormous bonfire, just to provide fleeting entertainment for a mob of mindless cretins. Makes me despair for the future of the human race. I know, I know, there are always other libraries. But that fact still didn’t make this needless tragedy any less painful for me, especially after the joy and euphoria of the new library opening.

Still, new libraries did follow, in other, safer parts of the town. And my love affair with reading science fiction continued unabated. And as I got older, and my financial situation improved, I began buying books of my own. Now I have a huge collection, more SF books than any library could hope to match, and I can find anything I like online. So I don’t bother with libraries anymore. But the local library is where my love affair with books, with SF, started.

Eventually we all have to get older, grow up, and take on the more hectic schedules and responsibilities of adult life. I left the heady days of twelve years old far behind. But nothing after that could match the purity, the innocence of my own Golden Age of Science Fiction, a period when things were so much less complicated and SF was the most important thing in my life.

It’s a pity we can’t turn back the clock, eh?

Phil