Strange and Wonderful Worlds: How I Discovered Science Fiction

Back in the late 1970s and 1980s, I discovered a literary genre that I knew existed but generally paid little attention to: science fiction. As a child in the 1950s and 1960s, I had been terrified and scared witless by science fiction movies – The Day the Earth Stood Still, Them, The War of the Worlds, and even b-grade movies that aired on television late on Saturday nights, like Caltiki, the Immortal Monster. 

But between those movies and the late 1970s, I had read only a small handful of science fiction works – Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and, in college, Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. My reading tending more to literary fiction and non-fiction; my major indulgence in popular fiction was murder mysteries, which enjoyed a minor resurgence in the 1970s.

But science fiction didn’t really interest me.

In 1977, I was in a bookstore in Houston, Texas, and for some reason found myself among the science fiction shelves (they were next to the mystery shelves). Shelved alphabetically by author’s last name, I noticed a book by scientist and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. It was entitled Foundation, the first in a trilogy about the alleged science of “psychohistory.” Asimov invented this “science” in his Foundation books; it claimed that the history of large populations could be predicted. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

The way of sand

After Matthew 7:21-27

He walks a beach

inhaling the beauty of the sea

sky sand sun

sand stretching across shore

horizontally

he steps among castles

of silicon granular cities

of sand standing in the sun

oblivious to encroaching waves

He considers rocky ground

once but easier is

the way of sand

Photograph by Lynn Greyling via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The dangers of sand

After Matthew 7:21-27

Dancing on sand

as the tide flows in

covering feet before

ebbing out again

over and over each time

a little higher

a little longer

retreating more slowly

as wave after wave

washes sand

washes sand away

sand dunes are beautiful

but ephemeral

a silicon mirage

Photograph by Weyenbergh Jacky via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The rock, the stone, the pebble

He searched for the rock, everywhere,

the stabilizer, the foundation, the assured

platform on which to stand and not shake

or shift or waver.

He looked everywhere for the stone,

the talisman he could palm or pocket

or hold to umbrella the rain

and melt the snow.

He looked everywhere for the pebble,

the rounded hardness hidden in the sole

of a shoe or the creviced floor, the pebble

to protect, first, and then empower,

second.

He found them all and he found more

of them, rocks, stones, pebbles

of varying sizes and colors, and they

worked as expected and they didn’t

work as expected because he had looked

in all the wrong places.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Peter Ackroyd’s “Foundation”

Rarely have I enjoyed reading a history book as much as I’ve enjoyed Peter Ackroyd’s Foundation: The History of England from its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors.

In one sense, it is a traditional history. Covering the period from the earliest traces of people in Mesolithic times (some 15,000 years ago) to the beginning of the Tudor dynasty about 1500, Foundation is structured largely along the lines of rulers and kings, whom, Ackroyd aptly points out, we know more about than commoners, farmers, serfs, and others of the lower classes. And so we learn about Julius Caesar and Claudius, the legend of King Arthur, the Anglo-Saxon kings, the Plantagenets, Yorks and Tudors.

But Foundation is a traditional history with a twist, actually two twists.

First, Ackroyd breaks up his kingly (and queenly) history with short vignettes: the effects of climate; how houses of the people changed; what the roads were like; descriptions of that most English of institutions, the village; the seasons; how non-English writers viewed the English; family life; the seasons; and others. These short chapters are less a sop to contemporary sensibilities (we democrats want the commoners’ story told) than it is an almost welcome relief from what otherwise would have been a pile-on of royal history.

Second, there is Ackroyd’s style. It is lively, fast-paced, and pointed, engaging the reader’s from the beginning and never once letting go. Ackroyd engages with the people he’s writing about, whether a monster like Richard III (or was that just a bad rep courtesy of Sir Thomas More and William Shakespeare) or a more saintly rulers, like Edward the Confessor. Without coming outright and saying so, the author seems to favor Henry II over St. Thomas a Becket, who doesn’t come across as the saintly figure he’s believed to be, at least in Ackroyd’s hands.

It can seem a jumble at times, just trying to keep track of all of the lines of Saxons, Vikings and Danes, Normans, Burgundians, Bretons, Welsh, and Scots, not to mention the English themselves and all their tangled lines and descents. But Ackroyd ties it together with essentially two themes. One is that England is not a country so much of law as it is a country of custom. And the other theme, related to the first, is that while much had changed over the course of 15,000 years, some things in English life have not changed at all. It’s a point he repeatedly returns to.

Foundation is a thoroughly enjoyable, highly readable book, filled with large ideas and small stories, artfully combined to present a picture of the country we know as England.

Related: Reading Peter Ackroyd

Photograph: Arundel Castle, West Sussex, by Karen Arnold via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Reading Peter Ackroyd

I’ve been reading Foundation: The History of England from its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors by Peter Ackroyd, and it’s a hard book to put down.

On almost every page I’m reminded why Peter Ackroyd is one of my favorite authors. This isn’t just a history of England; Ackroyd doesn’t just “write history.” He tells stories, and provides little asides, making the narrative come alive. In his hands, you’re not simply reading a history; you’re living it.

My first introduction to his writing was his biography of Charles Dickens. I was writing speeches for a corporate executive, and expected to read everything he read. And he was on a Dickens kick, which put a severe strain on my reading time, although I did get to read a lot of Dickens. But I saw this big fat biography in the bookstore (this was in the early 1990s, when we still had bookstores), and I bought it and read it. I marveled at how well Ackroyd knew his subject, the astounding depth of his research and how he kept the biography fully engaging in spite of its length. It’s more than 1,000 pages; the hardcover weighs 3.6 pounds.

Foundation is about 40 percent of the length of Dickens, but it is packed with that same knowledge and depth of research. 

I haven’t read everything Ackroyd has written; that would a challenge, because he is a wonderfully prolific writer. I have read London: A Biography and The Life of Thomas More. Last year, when we were in the shop at the National Gallery in London, my wife handed me his biography of the painter J.M.W. Turner, which I finished before we returned home. While we were there, we also saw the play The Mystery of Charles Dickens written by Ackroyd for Simon Callow.

Some years back, I read three of Ackroyd’s novels. Chatterton is about the poet Thomas Chatterton, who killed himself at 18 and turned out to be the author of a number of medieval poems he claimed to have discovered. The Clerkenwell Tales is about a nun in the 1300s who predicts a series of terrorist acts, which come to pass, and then the death of the king. Hawksmoor is a double, connected narrative, about a 20^th century detective investigating crimes connected to several churches built in the Christopher Wren period.

As you might guess, the three novels are rather dark tales. Of the three, I liked Hawksmoor the best.

Apart from these, the only other Ackroyd work I’ve read is The Death of King Arthur. I just downloaded The Canterbury Tales: A Retelling to my Kindle. And the second volume in his history of England, Tudors: The History of England from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I, is scheduled to be published in Britain in October.

And even after reading those, I still have other Ackroyd works available: biographies of Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Blake, Edgar Allen Poe and Sir Isaac Newton; and a biography of The Thames. And there are several others. (Fortunately, I read faster than he writes. Barely).

I’ve been reading Ackroyd over the last 20 years, and he’s become a favorite author. Nothing I’ve read of his has been disappointing. All the works are well worth the investment in time.

And now, back to reading Foundation. I’m just about at the part where Ackroyd describes the bubonic plague.

Photograph of Peter Ackroyd via El Nino Vampiro Lee.