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"SciFinery"
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Rating:
+5
SciFinery:
One Man’s Love Affair with Spaceships, Robots, Ray Guns, and All Things Generally Beyond Mankind’s Reach
Where to begin?
Why, it would be most logical to begin at the beginning, of course.
I kid you not: my earliest memories as a child involve science fiction. I’ve gone to great pains to shuffle back through the cobweb-covered recesses of my brain to find something else – my mother’s grin as she stared down at me in the crib, or perhaps watching my hand as I bent and flexed my tiny little fingers as all small children are prone to do – but, despite how hard I tried, I’ve never found anything more, say, human. Oh, I have found other visions – the giant stick-bug crawling across the bottom of the screen door of our first house in the city (I was born and raised – my first four years on Earth – on a farm in Midwestern Illinois); the metal, sparking ray gun that showed me that toys need not be only action figures with fixed Kung-fu grips; the lumbering robot menace from one of my early birthdays (third? fourth?) who lumbered across the living room floor, opened his chestplate, and fired a salvo of tiny, plastic missiles at my older sister. I’ve recalled other minor instances from my personal history as well, but what keeps coming back – when I give serious effort to the exercise – are two seminal moments, both involving world-shaping, soul-defining science fiction.
Let me detail both.
As a wee one, I suffered from what I can recall to be a terrible asthma-like condition. I say ‘asthma’ because that’s all I’ve ever known it to be (I specifically recall ‘bronchial asthma’ though I’ve never investigated the term for a greater understanding), though I did grow out of it, something contemporary physicians has told me is relatively unlikely, so perhaps I suffered a condition much like asthma that was, perhaps, misdiagnosed by a country doctor. In any event, I can remember it being very hard to breath. I was in and out of the area hospital, and I remember spending several long stays trapped in a bed with cotton blankets under an oxygen tent. (Google it, for those of you who may be unfamiliar with such an invention.) Spending all of those hours staring out at the world beyond plastic distortions probably monkeyed up my young, feeble, and formative brain in more ways than I’d care to know about, but we all have our crosses to bear. There’s mine. Now you know it.
When I wasn’t in the hospital, I was at home, wrapped up under thick cotton blankets on the couch (remember that whole “sweat it out of the kid” approach to medicine?), and this brings me to my first significant memory. From what I can recall, it was very early (4 am?), and I know that because my father was up getting ready for work. A factory man despite our living on a farm, he’d usually get me up at dawn to see how I was before he woke mom, gave her my prognosis, and left for the day. Generally, he’d check my temperature by thermometer and then prop me up on the couch with a pillow under the watchful eye of that universal babysitter – the television set. However, this morning, he found something different on the tube than the general early morning rabble – a cartoon, a Japanese import, at that – and he left that on for me. Within moments, I was immediately transfixed with a young boy who had travelled to Earth from a distant star, but, when the need arose, the kid would trigger a medallion on his chest. His necklace had an oversized outline of the letter ‘P’ on it. When activated, the interior of that outline filled with a dark fluid, and that magical action transformed the ordinary boy into Prince Planet, a crime-fighting warrior and superhero.
(Yeah, go on. Google it. You’ll see I’m not making this up. I’ve Googled it myself – once or twice – just make certain I hadn’t lost my mind or conjured up something that could be a franchise of its own.)
From what I remember, Prince Planet could do anything. He was super strong. He could fly. He wore a white suit with black piping … or maybe that was just the nature of black-and-white television. Nothing could stop him from defending the Earth – his adopted homeworld – until the time came that he would be called home as royalty to rule or preside or whatever it is one does when you’re inevitably called back home into planetary service. I could be wrong on a few of the particulars – I was but a very young lad myself, you recall – but that’s the general gist of it all, and I was absolutely mesmerized by what I saw. I watched quite possibly with my small eyes as wide as they could be opened as Prince Planet vanquished evil from this world.
My heart sang for this young superhero. In all of my two or three or four years on Earth myself, I had never seen something so profound. Prince Planet literally taught me how to run around, to leap and hop into place and set one’s footing so that you could be ready to vault into action at a moment’s notice (because you just knew that you were going to need to vault into action at a moment’s notice when you’re that age). He taught me that evil was a force in the universe that needed to met head on, fought only by one true of heart, and brought to its knees begging for its very survival. Prince Planet taught me the importance of superheroes and lasers and spaceships and alien planets and distant stars and battling robots and deadly throwing stars as well as instilling me with an underlying appreciation for mystical jewelry. It was a medallion on his chest, after all, that served as the source of his grandest superhuman abilities, and what I wouldn’t give – at my ripe young age – to find that I had such a necklace all of my own that would enable me to do the same? I had an older sister, as I confessed, and I knew no better source of evil in all of the universe than my older sister. If I had such a pendant myself, then superiority at the supper table and in bunk-bed-choice selection would be mine, and there wouldn’t be a thing she could do about it. Oh, sure. She could cry out for mom or dad or the police or the army or anyone else she thought would join her legion of doom, but all it would take for me to rise up and face down her “injustice league” was the click of a tiny, hidden button on my necklace.
The world would be my oyster, even though I had no idea of what an oyster was.
And that, my fellow science fiction friends, is my first memory.
Not crawling or walking or wiggling my fingers or my mother’s smile or Christmas morning or losing my first tooth or the Easter Bunny or some other such human nonsense.
It was superherodom, plain and simple, in all of its “sci-finery.”
My second memory?
That one would take me where no one had gone before.
Stay tuned.
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JSMaresca
August 12, 2011
Excellent !
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psikeyhackr
March 21, 2011
Interesting story. I did Google it. It was playing in the mid 60s. So that was years after I discovered sci-fi literature. I remember Superman and Mighty Mouse but I do not associate them with science fiction. In a most general since Superman might be put into that category, an alien from another planet brought by advanced technology. But there is just a tons and lack of seriousness to it that excludes it from what I regard as science fiction. .
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Scotman
March 18, 2011
What a great personal story! I had not heard of this guy, sounds similar to Astro Boy. I'll have to look that up. My first sci fi memory I think was reading Mystery in Space comics. Movie-wise, it was Ray Harryhausen's Jason & the Argonauts that woke the sleeping nerd in me. And then there's Star Trek but that's another story.
Scotman
March 18, 2011
I updated the Wiki for ya.
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About the reviewer
Ed (Trekscribbler)
Ranked #23
Ranked #23
What? You don't know enough about me from the picture? Get a clue! I'm a graduate from the School of Hard Knocks! You can find me around the web as "Trekscribbler" or "Manchops". … more
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About this topic
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with the impact of imagined innovations in science or technology, often in a futuristic setting.[1][2][3] Exploring the consequences of such innovations is the traditional purpose of science fiction, making it a "literature of ideas".[4]
Science fiction is largely based on writing rationally about alternative possibilities.[5] It is similar to, but differs from fantasy in that, within the context of the story, its imaginary elements are largely possible within scientifically established or scientifically postulated laws of nature (though some elements in a story might still be pure imaginative speculation).
The settings for science fiction are often contrary to known reality but the majority of science fiction relies on a considerable degree of suspension of disbelief, which is facilitated in the reader's mind by potential scientific explanations or solutions to various fictional elements. These may include:
- A setting in the future, in alternative timelines, or in an historical past that contradicts known facts of history or the archaeological record
- A setting in outer space, on other worlds, or involving aliens[6]
- Stories that involve technology or scientific principles that contradict known laws of nature[7]
- Stories that involve discovery or application of new scientific principles, such as time travel or psionics, or new technology, such as nanotechnology, faster-than-light travel or robots, or of new and...
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