What to read...

I didn't really know I was weird growing up.  I wanted to be either the witch or the prince in fairy tales.  I read The Hobbit when it arrived and I remember Franny Cohen showing me notes she'd written in runes.  I never got that far. I wanted to escape in barrels, too. I read adventure stories --The Three Musketeers, Robinson Crusoe, Robin Hood.  I don't know when I discovered Ursula Le Guin, but I immersed myself in her stories for a while.  That was when I knew what I was looking for, when I had discovered "what to read". 

The Lathe of Heaven was my confirmation that it was science fiction writers who would help me find the answers to what I was looking for.  I wanted to know more about magic and how to live in the world as a magician.  I had chosen that word to describe a collection of ideas and personal events that I had tried to define since I was a teen.  I had decided that if I had been born in another place or another time, I would have been put to work as some kind of seer.  I couldn't see anyting like that in the world we live in now.  I figured, and rightly, that those skills--the ones that would have been found probably in one or two people in a tribe--had been dispersed throughout the population.  Doctors, nurses, psychologists, ministers, sociologists... all of these and more would have been called shaman, healer, witch, seer.

So, what did I learn in The Lathe of Heaven that gave me a sense of anchoring in the modern world?  The main character, George Orr has "effective" dreams. His dreams change reality.  To keep this from happening, he self-medicates.  This was the first time I saw a glimmer of myself outside of my own head.  I didn't change reality, but my dreams were effective in other ways.

A critical piece of the novel was how Orr found help from inside his chaos.  The chaos came from his ability to remember both the pre- and post-dream worlds.  How do you learn to manage something this powerful and destructive?  With a little help from friends.  And where does one find such helpful friends?  It was the Beatles song itself that helped.  We call it an earworm now, that annoying and persistent presence of some snatch of song we pretend not to like.

From that little bit, I learned to pay attention to what I had learned as a kid was the "still, small voice".  Of course that was before boom boxes and iPods and such.  Heck, that was before rock and roll!

So, this rattling on is apropos what?   What do you read when you need to find your way along the edges of the world?  What do you read when you want to learn how to be different?  Who tells you stories that keep you company on dark soul nights? 

I was inspired to confess my own need for connection by a link to I'm Here. I'm Queer. What the Hell do I Read?.   

So, what do you read to relieve your sense of being the weird one in the room? Where does your own queerness find companionship?

m

A Romance

My romance with speculative fiction started with science fiction. This was the one place where people seemed to ask the kinds of questions that permeates my own thinking. When I say “permeate” I think I really mean "makes my thinking soggy", "distracts me for hours on end".

When I was in second grade, I remember asking the teacher why is two and two four. I’m sure she had not been asked that particular question before because she proceeded to explain how to count or add. That wasn’t what I was asking. I wanted to know how we came to figure out adding in the first place, who named it “two” and “four”, things like that. It turns out that it wasn’t a bad question. A couple of guys asked the question about 20 years ago, now and had were, admittedly, challenged to answer it. They wrote a book called Where Mathematics Comes From.

Did you know that there are people in the world who don’t count past three or four? They just have words like our “some”, “several”, “many” and “lots.” Have you considered the word “ginormous?” Or, the favorite topic of our now-defunct cafe tribe--a butt load? These are concepts we don’t consider, usually. One of the writers that has inspired me is Ursula Le Guin. She has been my educator in thinks like magic (The Earthsea Trilogy), shamanism (The Lathe of Heaven), gender (The Left Hand of Darkness). However, she wrote a short story that I remembered as being about the person who discovered the number “0” (zero). Did you know there was a time when we did not use zero as a place holder? Or negative numbers for that matter. But the idea of someone trying to persuade a world that there is a state of nothingness, that was an intriguing idea.

I haven’t provided a title because I’m not even sure the story is real. I could just be an idea that she inspired. But that is exactly the appeal of science fiction, in particular and speculative fictions in general. It’s an environment in which we can grow the things that the physics of the world we experience everyday does not allow. We can explore ideas about society, about ourselves and about the way the world works. For me, this is greater than the simplicity of just asking “what if”. Why? How? Who said? Why not? There are also the explorations of speculative fiction.

What kinds of questions does speculative fiction inspire you to ask? What kinds of questions do you ask that you find explored in its genres? Do you have authors you go back to, like favorite teachers?