Introduction
When I was very young, which was not so very long ago, my friends and I wanted to grow up to be firemen, policemen, airline pilots, and presidents. I suspect it says something for my generation when you consider that as youngsters our aspirations were to be successful civil servants. Certainly no one ever came up to me after a hard afternoon of sockball or kick-the-can and said, “Alan, when I grow up, I’m going to be a science-fiction writer.”
Even more certainly, I never said it to anyone. But it happened. Where, as my mother was once wont to ask, did I go wrong?
Probably by giving me all those comic books. Comic books are dangerous to the American way of life, you see. I’ve always agreed with that theory. A child raised on comics can’t help but grow up with a questing mind, an expanded imagination, a sense of wonder, a desire to know what make things tick—machines, people, governments.
No wonder our gilded conservatives are afraid of them.
I don’t remember when I first started drawing spaceships. I know I blossomed in the fifth grade. They weren’t very good spaceships, but in my soul I knew they were astrophysically sound. Someday I’d design real ones. I might have become an engineer, save for one inimical colossus who always loomed up to block my dream-way: mathematics.
I wasn’t helpless, but neither did I display a pre-
si
WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE …
cocious aptitude for differential calculus. My feelings were akin to those I experienced when I discovered that it took more than six piano lessons to play Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto—or even his First Concerto. Mentally, I drifted, my chosen profession blocked off to me at the tender age of eleven. – If it hadn’t been’for that damn book, The Spaceship Under the Apple Tree . . .