Views from Medina Road

I’ve been meaning for several weeks now to catch up on commenting about books I’ve read recently, but have not gotten around to organizing my notes and preparing proper summaries. I still haven’t gotten around to that, so never mind; let me spend an hour or so posting relatively off-hand reactions to the last 10 titles that I’ve read — cover images and links already updated in the column to the right.

Let me begin by dissing Bernard Beckett’s Genesis (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), which has got a fair amount of attention since it was published six months ago in the US. The author is a New Zealander not well-known in the field, and the book is not bad, just overly familiar. It is apt to impress readers to the extent they are unfamiliar with SFnal ideas. The entire first third is an “as you know, Bob” infodump; the debate about whether machines are intelligent or have souls is hoary; and the surprise ending rather undercuts the seriousness with which the reader is presumed to have taken the preceding ideas. It’s more suitable to a short story, Twilight Zone style, rather than a novel, even one as short as this.

Especially this time of year, I read books with a background motivation for deciding, if I were asked, would this book be appropriate for including on Locus‘ annual Recommended Reading List?

Beckett: No. The next four books: yes.

Shaun Tan’s Tales from Outer Suburbia (Scholastic/Arthur A. Levine) is a collection of illustrated short stories, or perhaps more accurately, a collection of artworks with text accompaniments. This is the first book by Tan with significant original text, and while the artwork is the dominant portion of the book, and if the book doesn’t quite achieve the brilliance of Tan’s masterwork The Arrival (which has no text at all), the combination of text and art is very fine, and several of the stories could ably stand as text poignant vignettes even without the artwork.

James Morrow’s Shambling Towards Hiroshima (Tachyon) is a brilliant short novel about a 1940s B-move star hired to portray a Godzilla-like monster in a US government-sponsored film intended to scare the Japanese into believing the existence of biological superweapon. Its depiction of 1940s Hollywood is redolent of classic films of that era, and its ties to SF fandom and to real period film figures (Willis O’Brien, James Whale), are canny and clever.

George Zebrowski’s Empties (Golden Gryphon) is a short horror novel that explicitly, in its afterword, alludes to the work of Fritz Leiber. It’s about a police detective who encounters cases of random deaths that are tied to a particular woman who, it develops, (* bit a spoiler here *) has the power to displace a person’s brain to the outside of their body… While there are two or three gross-out scenes worthy of this premise, the tone of the book is decidedly low-key, in keeping with the 1940s Leiber model, and which will no doubt keep this book from achieving widespread popularity in this era of much grosser-outer packages. It is, in fact, much more interested in the psychological attitudes of its characters, and while this sort of horror may not be in current style, the book is well-written and well-conceived, and worthy of a careful reader’s attention.

Thomas M. Disch’s The Proteus Sails Again (Subterranean Press) is a novella-length sequel to the novella-length The Voyage of the Proteus, which imagined a character named Tom Disch appearing in Homeric Greece aboard a ship populated by Socrates and others. If that premise seemed self-indulgent, and this new book (which apparently was the second of a planned trilogy of novellas, unfinished) might seem equally so, in fact this book is more fascinating for its autobiographical components, especially those involving actress Elizabeth Ashley, whose accidental fire in the apartment below Disch’s was instrumental in the degradation and ruinment of Disch’s life…

Next we have Kage Baker’s The Hotel Under the Sand (Tachyon), a pleasant YA children’s [see comments below] fantasy about a girl marooned on a desert island occupied by a sand-buried hotel and its occupants. I may have been oversold by Adrienne Martini’s review in the August issue of Locus Magazine; what I read didn’t quite live up to my expectations from that review, an effect I try to be aware of when writing my own reviews. It’s a nice book, and what impressed me most was the way Baker finesses explanations for situations that in realistic terms would require more details that her text actually provides.

At this point I should acknowledge — in accordance with some federal law just passed, apparently — that the Morrow, Zebrowski, and Baker titles discussed above were all sent to Locus Online as review copies, which I gratefully acknowledge. (Others discussed were purchased by Locus Online via Amazon.com.)

One more title for tonight, also a deeply-appreciated review copy: The Collected Captain Future, Volume One, from Haffner Press. Edmond Hamilton was the quintessential space opera writer of the 1930s and ’40s, but he was an author I had never read: with this book in hand, I read the 150-page long title story, “Captain Future and the Space Emperor”, first published in 1940. It is a hoot; it is a casebook of prose the like of which is described in writing courses under the heading *do not write like this* — a compendium of “said-bookisms” such as “he muttered sickly to himself”, “the President asserted confidently”, “the thing gasped hoarsely”, and so on and on. But more than that, it’s a tale of simple presumptions about space flight and planetary natives and easy villains with unironic tags like “space emperor”… So unironic that it’s hard to believe anyone could have read this stuff without choking. Isn’t there a lesson here, though, about context and presumptions and relative sophistication? Might we reflect on what has or has not changed since then? As an example, here back in 1940 two of Edmond Hamilton’s characters debate about who or which is most human… a debate carried on in subsequent decades by Isaac Asimov and STTNG’s Data and all the way to Bernard Beckett’s Genesis. Some things never change; some debates seem never to be resolved.

Next time: Suzanne Collins, Robert J. Sawyer, Patrick Ness. And — currently deep into tiny print reading of — Robert Charles Wilson’s Julian Comstock.

We saw Julie and Julia a couple weeks ago and so of course I had to come home and order a copy of her cookbook from Amazon.com, and then, pace Slate, we set about making the film’s signature dish, boeuf bourguignon. This is basically chunks of beef browned and then simmered in red wine, served with mushrooms and onions and boiled potatoes, but the recipe has all sorts of little details: you blanch bits of bacon before sauteing it, and using its fat to saute first the beef, then the vegetables (onion and carrot); after sauteing the beef, you sprinkle it with flour and then brown it, before adding the wine and stock for the long simmering process; and you separately prepare the onions and mushrooms to serve with the beef.

My policy is to follow a recipe to the letter, the first time I make something, and so I even used all the butter that Julia calls for to prepare the onions and mushrooms — much more than I’m used to using to cook anything, especially considering my devotion in recent years to the principles of ‘clean eating’ and a diet of lean protein, complex carbs, and healthy fats. (With which I took off 25 excess pounds in three months last year. Another story.) But like I said, the first time.

The process was not without misadventure; not owning anything like Julia’s
“fireproof casserole”, we guessed incorrectly about the suitability of a ceramic pot in which to brown the beef, before adding the liquid and then moving to the oven. After sitting above a stove burner for 45 minutes, the pot shattered when I lifted it. Remarkably, we managed to recover not just all the solids, the beef and vegetables, but most of the liquid, from the top of the stove (fortunately clean enough), and with just a little supplementation of additional wine, we then simmered the concoction for the required 2-3 hours on the stove top in a stainless steel pot, rather than in the oven. Worked just fine.

Julia’s cookbook is fascinating because it reflects a different era in which even ambitious chefs did not have the access to fresh vegetables, or a variety of herbs, that is common now. Thus it has recipes for how to cook frozen asparagus, and frozen green beans!

Then we made chicken fricassee. (Now I know what fricassee means.) Next, I think, we should try that ultimate challenge of French cooking: a souffle. I’ll let you know.

One of the features of living in southern California is the periodic spectacle of wildfires that darken our skies with smoke and threaten our towns and neighborhoods with conflagration. The latest, which started last week in the Angeles National Forest in the mountains to the northeast of LA, has made national news for its size and continued growth more than for its destruction, a couple dozen structures so far, though it still poses an urgent threat to, among other things in its path, the famed Mt. Wilson Observatory.

The fire is relevant to this blog because it’s burning in exactly the range of mountains you see in the panoramic photo shown at the top of this page, about 20 miles to the east-northeast of my house. On Saturday night, and again last night, the range was dotted with orange specs, and some larger flares of obvious flames that must have been enormous to be so visible at that distance, throughout the night.

Against that backdrop Yeong and I drove into Hollywood Saturday evening to attend this year’s Writers and Illustrators of the Future Awards ceremony, their 25th annual awards, and so staged with somewhat more pomp that past ceremonies I’ve attended. This year it was at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, just down the street from Graumann’s Chinese Theater and the new Kodak Theater where the Oscar Awards are now staged each year — in fact, this year’s WotF ceremony was held in the very room where the *first* Oscar Awards were handed out in 1929…

The Writers/Illustrators of the Future Awards ceremonies are always somewhat surrealistic, compared to typical science fiction/fantasy presentations such as the Hugo or World Fantasy Awards, partly because they are staged to Hollywood standards of glitz and glamor and (at least comparatively) professionalism. The dress code is formal (though this detail had been absent from my e-mail invitation), video and photo crews record the event and broadcast it on the web, and the hosts and presenters maintain confidant, ever-smiling game-show-emcee stage presences. The ceremony runs like clockwork, the awards recipients and presenters standing in such similar poses for their photographs, and the winners so consistently thanking L. Ron Hubbard and/or the Writers/Illustrators of the Future contest itself, that one assumes fairly extensive rehearsals, or even coaching.

But the surrealism also comes from the glowing photo of L. Ron Hubbard that gazes down from one corner of the room, and the capsule video history of the great man that begins the evening. There were two special presenters on this year’s program, a Dr. Harry Kloor, who introduced a clip from a forthcoming animated “educational sci-fi adventure” film called Quantum Quest, and one Don Hartsell, commissioner and managing director of the World Sky Race, who described this grandiose around-the-world competition of airships that’s scheduled to take place in 2011. It wasn’t obvious how either of these topics related to the evening’s awards (though the same might be said for more than a couple Nebula Awards guest speakers), other than they sustained the spirit of self-promotion and self-congratulation begun earlier with the flurry of commendations and citations about the contest from various government, publishing, and educational bodies in that video history, and in the host’s introduction, among special guests attending the event, of numerous Hollywood film and TV actors — none of whom I’d ever heard of, but then I don’t keep up on that industry — as if to specially validate the significance of the evening’s events.

The elephant in the room of course was the Church of Scientology, but to give the contest due credit, the organizers of the awards ceremony and the week-long workshop that precedes it are reportedly scrupulous about keeping church influence out of the business of running these contests. Certainly the prominent writers and judges who participate in these contests year after year – Tim Powers, Kevin J. Anderson, Jerry Pournelle, Rob Sawyer, and many others — do so in genuine support of new talent, in the “pay forward” spirit of our genres, apparently without concern that the contest seems to endorse the Church in any way; this separation surely goes back to the origins of the contest, when Algis Budrys, one of the original judges (and editor of the anthologies), got so many other prominent writers involved. (At the same time, water was the only beverage available at the post-awards reception, and even the dinners arranged for the contest judges and special guests provided only water and coffee. And it’s easy to speculate about why those particular film/TV actors happened to be present at this event.)

As for the awards — they included the presentation of trophies to all 24 of the writer and illustrator quarterly winners and finalists, each pair announced by a pair of judges or special guests, though none of them were surprises since quarterly results had already been announced throughout the past year. The culmination of the evening were the two grand prizes, which *were* surprises: they were Emery Huang (a Florida native of Chinese ancestry) for the Writers of the Future contest and Oleksandra Barysheva (a native of Ukraine now living in New Jersey) for the Illustrators of the Future.

As the ceremony ended Yeong and I lingered as official photos were taken, picked up free copies of the new L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future anthology, and then joined Amelia Beamer and Gary K. Wolfe, who had been at the event since Friday afternoon to cover the event for Locus and talk with the students. We retired to the hotel bar for real drinks and chatted about the evening. Amelia’s photos, and a formal write-up of the awards ceremony, will appear in Locus Magazine.

– Later, 9p.m.: here’s an image from tonight’s view of the fire, about the best I can do given my limited skill and equipment… Click for larger view.

One topic I talked about with Charles Brown the last time I spoke with him (that May weekend trip to the Bay Area I blogged about earlier, and which CNB wrote about in his June issue editorial), was the idea of doing another, or perhaps several, polls of all-time best novels. A reader had written him suggesting an update, since the last all-time novels poll was done by Locus way back in 1998 (my Locus Index to SF Awards has the results posted here), though I’d done a similar poll for short fiction, anthologies, and collections on the website the following year (here).

As I’ve alluded too frequently in this blog, I’ve been compiling such polls and expert-lists and lists of best sf/f/h titles from reference books for some years now with the intention of supplementing the awards data in the SF Awards Index — and some of that additional data will see the light of day in the next update to the Awards Index, currently planned for early November after the World Fantasy Awards winners are announced. One element of this index expansion will be what might be called a ‘meta-list’ of best SF novels (and, separately, fantasy novels, and perhaps horror novels), in the manner of the Top 100 Books Meta-List that Newsweek magazine posted on its website a couple months ago. A definitive top 100 SF novels list, so far as one can be objectively compiled. (I’ve been iterating results of such a list for some time now, as new source lists keep appearing and I keep refining the relative ranking criteria.)

So new reader polls of all-time novels would be a valuable addition to this resource pool. I’m willing to set up such polls on the website and compile the results, and I’m also open to any suggestions about how best to set up such polls — keeping in mind that this might as easily be a series of polls as a single poll. Separate polls by decade? By novels published before 1980 and since? Separately by SF, fantasy, and horror? Should poll forms include seed titles of likely candidates, as the annual online Locus Poll ballots have done (but which some voters object to), or not? I have some ideas along these lines already, but suggestions are welcome — email me privately, or comment to this post.

My partner and I participated in helping to boost the US economy (or at least the fortunes of car dealers) this past month, by taking part in the ‘Cash for Clunkers’ program that made sufficiently inefficient gas guzzlers eligible for a $3500 – $4500 trade-in value toward a new vehicle with sufficiently better gas mileage. Yeong was in China last month when the program became big news for having nearly run through its initial budget of $1 billion so quickly. I emailed him a link to a news story about the program, and added, yr Ford Explorer? His aged 1994 Ford Explorer with 190,000 miles on the odometer had been sitting in a driveway, undriven for months and gathering dust. By the time he and his two college-aged sons returned home, they had speculated on a range of potential replacements, settling on the small SUV solution space, partly to keep some sort of SUV in the extended family and partly to replace for daily commuting chores Yeong’s well-worn BMW convertible, itself with 130,000 miles on the dial and increasingly expensive to maintain, but which he does not want to sell.

So beginning the weekend of August 15th we made the rounds of car dealers, focusing on three candidates that were highly rated by Consumer Reports and which were popular [taking college-aged perspectives into account] — the Honda CR-V, the Toyota RAV4, and the Subaru Forester. Over the course of the weekend we visited three Honda dealers, four or five Toyota dealers, and two Subaru dealers throughout the Los Angeles/Orange County area. The Honda and Subaru dealers had typical customer traffic given the weak economy, i.e. not much, while the Toyota dealers were overwhelmed with customers. The first Toyota dealer we visited had no cars on the lot to test drive at all. The second had two — oh wait, that one just sold, said another salesman running up to us as we prepared for a test drive — had one RAV4 to test drive, and not in the color or model that we had in mind. On Sunday we stopped by Longo Toyota, one of the largest dealers in Southern California — a huge place the size of a mall, with its own Starbucks in one corner and two cafeteria-sized rooms full of customers filling out paperwork at little square tables. There were a dozen or so RAV4s on the lot, but we weren’t inclined to join that customer herd.

So eventually… we bought the Subaru Forester. We decided the Honda was solid and dependable but rather dull; the RAV4 was fun but hard to get (and under the circumstances Toyota dealers were demanding full sticker price); the Forester wasn’t as common (once I’d started noticing, I saw CR-Vs and RAV4s *everywhere*), was fun to drive, and a better value (with all-wheel drive standard, rather than an option, for a similar price). I’ll also admit that one reason we considered it in the first place, and partly what swayed me in its direction, was that Subaru appeals to a specific marketing segment to which we happen to belong, its ads for the Forester appearing in several special-interest magazines I subscribe to…

But wait, the story isn’t over yet. Ironically, car dealers were finding it a bit of a hassle to deal with ‘cash for clunkers’ customers, because the government requirements for clunker rebates were exacting about the necessary documentation. Two requirements are (were) that the trade-in have been both registered and insured for the past 12 months. OK, here are insurance cards, and here’s the current registration out of the glove box. But wait, the registration runs November to November, so that proves only registration for the past 9 months. But who saves old registration forms? Most people don’t. [Well, I do.] So our first attempt to close a deal stalled, late that Sunday night. Yeong had to make a trip to the DMV [California’s Department of Motor Vehicles] the following week to get documentation showing he’d registered the Explorer every year for the past 15 years since he’d bought it. And by that time — sorry, Subaru of Thousand Oaks! — he’d contacted a couple other Subaru dealers via the web and gotten a better offer on the model he wanted. Despite that hassle, it all ended well, with him taking delivery of his shiny black new Forester, for $500 above invoice, last Friday.

Is there any kind of SFnal connection here? Well, I’ll say this: I appreciate cars and have been attentive to car designs since I was, what, 10 years old. I’ve saved a cool pictorial of future cars from a mid-1960s Boys’ Life magazine that perhaps I’ll scan and post someday. As a driver, of family and rental cars for a couple decades, I’m one of the legion of customers who’ve been so unimpressed by US cars that their makers have been going bankrupt lately. (Thus our solution space of Japanese makes, though of course actual vehicles are mostly built in the US or Canada.) All of that aside, it’s worth noting how far car technology has advanced. All cars, even the US models I get when I rent on business trips, are better built, more solid, and with more features, than those ’50s and ’60s “classics” revered by collectors. Features that were unimaginable a couple decades ago are standard now. Navigation systems are especially cool, and our new Subaru has a Nav screen that displays current location with an ever-shifting map display that orients itself to the direction the car is driving. It’s just one example of how, for those us paying attention, the future we’ve imagined and thrilled about for so long is arriving in reality, day by day.

As promised in the previous post, the Roundtable Blog has now been recast to a format matching the rest of the site. A detail or two still needs adjusting, e.g. the Contributors list is offset a bit, because Blogger wants to format it as an unordered list, and I’ve managed to remove the automatic bullets but not yet the automatic indentation. So many little details…

I’m glad to see more activity on the Roundtable lately, especially in the comments. We’ll never be Tor.com, I suppose, but the idea of the Roundtable has always been to attract the kind and volume of serious discussion that has been appearing lately. Always open for reconsideration is how to present this on the homepage; is the block beneath the current issue block appropriate? Should the Roundtable block be more or less prominent?

Next up: resetting the News Blog. After that: the next phase of the Awards Index expansion. (I have a topic I’ll post on the Roundtable myself, in the next couple weeks, based on some of the work I’ve been doing on those expansion projects.)

I have, off and on, for several days now, been working to complete the final phase of the Locus Online Redesign Project, which means specifically to convert the two initial site blogs, News and Roundtable, to the format of the site homepage and the other blogs (such as Reviews), with the same page width, the same menu bar across the top, and a similar right sidebar.

Converting those two initial blogs is not a trivial task, alas; those blogs descended from different stylesheets, and different Blogger templates, than the current batch, and, well, it’s like trying to plastic-surgically modify cousins a couple times removed to appear identical. But I expect to resolve the details soon, in another day or two.

Meanwhile, I’ve read a few books lately (as displayed in the right sidebar here), and plan to resume my own style of brief book notes/reviews in this blog shortly…. as soon as I finish those redesign tasks.

No, I am not at this year’s Worldcon in Montreal, I am sorry to report; I’m missing Worldcon for only the second time in 20 years (the other time being two years ago in Japan); the economy has affected Locus Online’s discretionary budget for convention trips, leaving only the upcoming World Fantasy Con as a potential con attendance for this year. (Needless to say, there is no corporate (Locus) travel account for business trips, at least not for electronic editors-in-chief; advertising revenue from the site is down some 50% from last year; and day-job income has been cut via furlough days, never mind annual merit raises.) I’d looked forward to Montreal, a city I’ve never visited, but it has not worked out. Maybe someday.

I’ve used some extra time this past week to catch up on posts to the website, and to work those continual background projects I keep alluding to and which I promise will see the light of Google searches real soon now.

I understand that a wake for Charles N. Brown was held earlier today, Saturday, at the convention, and presumably a report and photos from that will appear in Locus Magazine. Various awards results have been announced at the convention, I’ve seen from other websites, and I’ve posted breaking news links on the homepage since the Locus editors now responsible for the site’s News blog are preoccupied at the con.

I see that the motion to eliminate the Semiprozine category failed — though I also saw a post somewhere (I’ve lost the link) that said a motion passed to re-examine the definition of the category (to specify that no one makes a primary income from the publication) in such away that might well make Locus Magazine ineligible anyway. As a recipient of a Hugo in a category that was eliminated for whatever reason, I sympathize. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Over the weekend I attended the Charles N. Brown memorial, which was held in San Francisco at Borderlands Books, Sunday beginning at noon. That event was preceded by a smaller ‘memorial bar-b-q’ at Brown’s house in Oakland on Saturday evening, for the extended staff and a few guests who had flown in from out of town. I drove up from L.A. with Yeong on Saturday, arriving at the house just as the smoke from the grill began seriously billowing.

The mood was congenial and even festive, considering the circumstances, with people reminiscing about Charles, of course, but also catching up with friends they hadn’t seen in months or years. Locus staff were there, along with spouses (including the husbands of Liza and Amelia, Matt and Mars respectively, whom many of us had heard about for years but never met), as were Bob Silverberg and Karen Haber, Connie Willis and husband Courtney, Cecilia Holland, Eileen Gunn and John Berry, Mark Budz and Marina Fitch, and others. Gary Wolfe had flown in Thursday, partly to meet with the lawyer handling the estate. Gary, Liza, and Kirsten were named trustees of the estate in Charles’ will, and will handle the transition of assets to the Locus Foundation, which has a couple loose ends to tie up before becoming an official nonprofit organization.

It had not been announced, but Charles had been cremated, and his ashes were in a box inside a velvet bag, on one of the Craftsman tables in a corner of the living room.

Charles’ estate will be left to the “Locus Science Fiction Foundation”, as it’s formally known. The intent by everyone in the Foundation is to leave the house and collection intact, indefinitely, as a working space and as a resource. The magazine will go on, with no changes anticipated in the near term, though some changes are bound to occur in the longer term as others will necessarily replace what was Charles’ guidance.

Saturday evening the bbq focused on grilled meat — chicken, ribs, sausage, tri-tip — as Charles would have wanted it, someone said. Beer, wine, champagne, and single malt scotch flowed. Stories were told and memories shared.

The crowd at Borderlands on Sunday was somewhat larger — 50 or 60 people, I’d guess, with store managers Alan Beatts and Jude Feldman ably stage-managing, and providing tables of hors d’oeuvres and an open bar. The crowd mingled for some time before Liza called everyone’s attention and introduced Gary Wolfe, who spoke briefly about the “Magus of Oakland” and then introduced the principal speakers, Bob Silverberg, Dick Lupoff, and Connie Willis. They talked about Charles, his place in the field, related memories, told some jokes. A central Silverberg incident (paraphrasing in the 3rd person)–

Charles was an autograph hound early on, and every time he saw Silverberg would present him with three or four of his latest books for signatures. On one occasion Brown and Silverberg were late for an appointment, but Brown insisted on getting an autograph in a particular rare first edition right away. So Silverberg obliged, a bit irritated.

A few months later Silverberg suffered the famous fire that burned his mansion in New York, including the top floor with his office and book collection. He set about rebuilding his collection of his own books, with help from friends — including Brown, who gave to Silverberg the rare first edition he’d gotten autographed.

Which is why someday Silverberg’s executor will wonder why his library contains a copy of one of his own books signed “Here’s another goddamn autograph – Robert Silverberg”.

Dick Lupoff also related memories, and told about being locker buddies with Charles at the local YMCA until just recently. Connie talked about doing the Locus Awards with Charles, and driving…

On one trip to New Mexico for the Jack Williamson Lectureship, Connie was driving with Charles in the car and three other cars following — and she got lost, in Portales, confused by the angled grid of some of the town streets. She made a few turns trying to orient herself, with the other cars following, then finally pulled over and got out to tell the car behind her to lead the way.

She got back in her car and Charles asked what she was doing. She explained that she didn’t know where they were and told the other car to lead. I know exactly where we are, Charles said. You do?? Why didn’t you tell me? Charles replied, Because it’s so much fun watching you get exasperated!

Despite the humor, Connie finally broke down and finished through tears.

Liza followed, also fighting tears. Amelia read an email from the airline, apologizing to passengers for the delay upon landing because of a medical emergency, an email that had been sent to everyone aboard — including Charles. A few others spoke — Ellen Klages, Rina Weisman, Carol Buchanan — and then everyone crowded together for what was called the final Charles Brown photo op. Liza took a couple photos, Amelia a couple, and Alan Beatts a couple — I think they plan to photoshop them together, so that everyone present will appear in a single photo.

Look for it in an upcoming issue of Locus Magazine.

I’m old enough to remember — I was 13, in the summer between 8th and 9th grades. Star Trek had ended a couple months earlier, I had survived two weeks in the hospital following a ruptured appendix a couple months before that (“In the Year 2525″ ran endlessly on the radio that played in my shared room), a year or so before that, 2001: A Space Odyssey had premiered, and only a year or two before that, I had started reading science fiction. My family was living in a Chicago suburb, where my father was working as an industrial architect on what became known as Fermilab.

We had a black and white TV, and I remember the grainy pictures as we sat late into the night (if I recall correctly), watching the descent down the ladder and the famous first words. I can’t say I remember, first-hand, much else.

I do remember more of the context, and of events before and after. I was old enough to recognize the historical importance of the event, though young enough that it did not seem quite so awesome, so miraculous, as it did to the adults, who lacked the science fictional perspective I’d just recently acquired.

A couple of weeks later, my family set off on one of our standard summer vacations, driving and camping from one national park to the next. We hit Great Smoky Mountain National Park first, and then we visited Washington DC, staying not in a campground but with cousins of my mother’s in a Washington suburb. Sometimes it’s the peripheral events that linger in the memory as long as the central events: we visited Dulles airport, just so my father could admire the architecture, and there I bought a paperback book called We Reach the Moon by one John Noble Wilford, who I see is still 40 years later writing for the New York Times; the book was an early example of what became known as ‘instant’ books, written and published within days or weeks of a newsworthy event. (And of course, I still have the book.) And I remember, during that stay with my mother’s cousins, explaining to everyone what the film 2001 was ‘really’ about — I had read the book.

Those peripheral events were the context in which I witnessed the first moon landing. Yes, it was amazing and historic… but at the same time, it was a modest achievement, and it was inevitable. There were space stations and starships and a whole future history yet to come. Apollo 11 was significant — but in a way I couldn’t admit or explain to anyone else, not so impressive, really. The really cool stuff was yet to come.

Of course, much has changed since then.