Old Books

The Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) was founded in 1965 as a professional organization for authors in that genre. They started giving the annual Nebula Award to honor excellence in science fiction annually from then on. Five years later they created a three-book anthology called “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame” to honor short stories and novellas published before 1965 that had been written in a time before the association began giving awards. The oldest pieces in the collection are “The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells from 1895 and “The Machine Stops” by E.M. Forster from 1909. Otherwise, they date from the late 1920s to the early 1960s. They include “Arena” by Fredric Brown which was loosely adapted into a first season episode of “Star Trek” (the original series), “It’s a Good Life” by Jerome Bixby which was faithfully adapted into a classic episode of “The Twilight Zone,” “Who Goes There?” by John W Campbell Jr. which was adapted into the two film versions of “The Thing,” the second of which, John Carpenter’s 1982 version is much more faithful to the story than the 1951 version, “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes which was adapted into the film “Charly” for which Cliff Robertson won a Best Actor Academy Award, as well as many other brilliant and ravishing stories, some of which I remember reading in other collections decades ago, such as “Nightfall” by Isaac Asimov, “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” by Roger Zelazny, and “The Nine Billion Names of God” by Arthur C. Clarke.

I bought this set of books when they were published, but I never got around to reading them. I did peruse them briefly and saw that many of the stories were 30 or even 40 years old. “These stories are really old,” I thought.

As I finally took the books off the shelf to read last month, though, I realized that the books themselves were now older then the vast majority of stories they comprised at the time they were published. These three books, these physical objects, are more than a half century old. And frankly, they are showing their age. The covers of two of the three books that I’ve been reading so far have both fallen off, and I’ve needed to tape them back on, and I won’t be surprised if the same thing happens to the third.

As for myself, I find it hard to believe how easy it was at one point in my leaf life to read mass market paperbacks with their small font print. I have had some vision problems lately, primarily some macular degeneration in the left eye, and while I can still read these books, I need a lot more light than I used to.

One of the things I’ve enjoyed as I ease into retirement is the ability to explore my shelves, my boxes, my stacks of books, built up over scores of years, many of them still unread. I am making it a habit now to spend some time in this now-dusty collection to discover books that at various points, decades past, captivated me and see if they still hold a fascination for me.

So far these books have, and as I peruse other books I bought in my 20s, my 30s, my 40s, I will undoubtedly discover things about my past self through the things I chose to collect at those periods of my life.

So when weather permits, come looking for me on my back deck sitting at my patio table under the umbrella on any sunny, not too hot, day, and you were likely to find me reading a book I bought in my youth hoping to gain the wisdom of the ages.

What’s remarkable is that, even at this age, I find that there is still so very much to learn.