I am enjoying my new technology, the Kindle. I am exploring the books I am able to access through Amazon’s free ebooks, Project Gutenberg, Baen Books and public library sources such as the Southern California Digital Library. I have even gone so far as to buy books I want to reread.
One of my new discoveries is that Project Gutenberg is making old science fiction available. I saw a couple of titles of the Skylark series and downloaded them. I have found Andre Norton, Algis Budrys, H. Beam Piper, and others I have not read in years. It is like old home week.
I am learning that you can’t always go home again.
In some cases the problem is that I have grown up. I did not begin serious reading until I discovered science fiction in the school library during my seventh grade year. I became a voracious reader. I remember reading everything that Andre Norton wrote and loving every minute of it. In a box somewhere in someone’s garage I have an extensive collection of her work.
As an adult I have gone back and tried to re-read some of her stories. It is amazing all of the detail that I missed. Like many other science fiction writers of the day, she had an agenda. I was blessed in that I was so naive that I did not see it. She knew how to tell a good story and that was all I was after. I missed the heavy doses of the occult that were mixed in with everything she wrote.
She had a fascination with cats. Her cats were not just pets or companions. She was not into pot holders with pictures of kitties and tea pots made to look like pussy cats. In going back and trying to read some of her stories the cats take on the role that witchcraft would call familiars. They were strangely sentient and a major part of the story.
Other books had a heavy dose of witchcraft. I remember her Witchworld series. I loved them. They were action stories set in a medieval, feudal fantasy world. With my adult awareness of the demonic I have not had the heart to go back and read them again.
I missed it all at the time.
To be continued...
homo unius libri
"With great knowledge comes great sorrow."
ReplyDeleteYes, but no pain, no gain.
DeleteGrace and peace