I persevered with my school work, finding in myself certain talents for the biological sciences. Math always cropped up somehow, somewhere, stopping me. What to do? I was good at English and history, but I wanted to design spaceships* dammit!
I kept on drawing them, knowing it was futile, but unable to resist the smooth lines, the sensuous curves of propulsive exhausts, the sharp stab of some irresistible power-beam. When I started fiddling around with writing, I stayed away from science fiction. Impossibly complex, intricate, challenging … I wrote love stories, mysteries, even fantasy. How could I consider writing science fiction when The World of Null-A read like Chinese? I didn’t even read that much sf, turning instead to natural history, politics, science, literature—I immersed myself throughout high school in tons of such nonscience fiction. Little did I know.
It started in college, at UCLA. The more arcane philosophy I was forced to read, the more I looked forward to relaxing with the directions of the good doctor Asimov. Thomas Hobbs drove me to relax in the humor and humanity of Eric Frank Russell. The painful details of political science were less hurtful when salved with judicious doses of Robert Sheckley, or buried beneath the smooth logic of Murray Lein-ster. I read enormous amounts of science fiction.
I discovered E. E, Smith and John Tame, whose space-time concepts made those of the lectures I attended shrink into laughability.
But I was that second-most-crippled college bastard, a political science major (the worst, he who majors in