Getting Ready

 So I've been preparing, and wracking my brain for things from my youth that mean something to me. It has led me to an interesting discovery - setting side role-playing books, there aren't a whole heck of a lot of fiction books that really stand out that made an impact with me in my pre-college days.

To tell the truth, college kind of killed my joy of reading, not that reading has ever come easy for me. Not for any literacy reason, but as I got older, reading got harder and harder to do because it made me fall asleep. On top of that, as I entered college, I was required to read books I really had no desire or real drive to read. With a few exceptions, any fiction I was required to ready was very few-and-far-between, and in those cases it was generally academic-style work that I felt was rather irrelevant.

Now, I know I'll probably ruffle some feathers with this, but I never understood why we were required to read "classics" in American Literature that, while important historically, no longer reflect the way writing is done now. To me, it's like the Rolling Stones - I don't particularly care for them myself, but I recognize their impact on music.

I wouldn't have a problem learning about the classics, but requiring us to read things like The Scarlet Letter and Great Expectations was, to me, frustrating as all get out.

This outlook followed and influenced my view of film as well. If given the choice between sitting through another film by Francois Truffaut again or being stung by a wasp, I'd take the wasp every time - at least it's quick.

I digress. I'm getting off track, here, and likely making some folks angry at the same time.

What I'm trying to get across is that there aren't a lot of books that strike me as making a big impact from my childhood. It's a brief list, and I thought I'd share it.

• Fox in Socks by Dr. Seuss
• Marvel's Greatest Superhero Battles by Stan Lee
• Superman IV: The Quest for Peace from DC Comics by Bob Rozakis (author), Curt Swan, Don Heck, Frank McLaughlin, Al Vey, John Beatty, and Dick Giordano (artists)
• The Dragonlance Chronicles Trilogy by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
• The Forgotten Realms Pools Trilogy (Pool of Radiance by James M. Ward and Jane Cooper Hong; Pools of Darkness and Pool of Twilight by James M. Ward and Anne K. Brown)
• The Bill, the Galactic Hero series by Harry Harrison and others (Robert Sheckley, David Bischoff, Jack C. Haldeman, and David Harris)
• The Apostle of Insanity trilogy from the Mutant Chronicles (In Lunacy by William F. Wu, Frenzy by John Allen Price, and Dementia by Michael A. Stackpole)
• Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Why Fox in Socks? Simply because I remember my dad reading that to us as kids. Understand that my dad is an actor - a very good actor, though he won't admit it - and he'd get really into reading us stories. I don't remember exactly what he'd do, but I do remember being read this as a child.

Getting past that, I remember this yellow book featuring the Thing and the Hulk on the cover. The book belonged to my dad, and he let me read it. It had a collection of various stories including the Hulk vs. Thor and the two-part story that would make an important impact on me to this day - Fantastic Four numbers 25 and 26 originally published in 1964, a full 15 years before I was born. This story single-handedly introduced me not only to the wonders of comic books, but to my absolute favorite superhero of all time - to this day, bar none - Ben Grimm, The Thing. In the story he goes toe-to-toe with the Hulk, and I remember the cover. The Thing is a big and strong guy, but the Hulk is drawn bigger and more menacing. I remember reading the story and being awestruck when the Thing goes face-to-face with the Hulk and he knows he can't match him blow-for-blow, and that there's little hope of winning the fight ... but he does it anyway.

This story showed me that The Thing was a guy who'd take a beating and get back up, every time, no matter what. It endeared The Thing to me for all time. There has never been a time in my life when I didn't love The Thing. The story showed me that even superheroes argue, get into fights, and in the end find common ground against a greater adversary. It also taught me something that I didn't realize until later in my life - that the villain of a story isn't necessarily evil, but rather could be misunderstood.

That comic led me into the comic book store with my father where I bought my first comic book - the comic-version of the movie Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. Say what you will about that movie, it holds a warm place in my heart because I remember it so vividly. What the comic book showed me, however, was that the same thing in different mediums could be different. The comic book was created based on an earlier draft of the script, so it had a lot of differences in it that weren't in the movie. It was different, but not in a bad way - it gave me a brief glimpse behind the curtain of creativity and showed me that different mediums could be used in different ways to tell the same story in different ways and that just because I saw the movie, a book or comic book could tell me another aspect of the story.

I really think it's what led me to love extra features on DVDs so much, honestly.

I remember reading the Dragonlance Chronicles Trilogy by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman was a book I read in junior high (yes, we had junior high, not middle school). It was a big, thick, white book that I remember was over 1,000 pages in total. It took me a while to read through the whole thing, but I remember feeling a huge sense of accomplishment when I read the last page and knew that I had read that thing cover-to-cover. I was proud of myself for doing it. The books were pretty good, too.

Staying in the Dungeons & Dragons vein, the Forgotten Realms Pools books (Pool of Radiance, Pool of Twilight, and Pools of Darkness) were books I picked up entirely due to playing Pool of Radiance on the Commodore 128D my brother had. It was all because of the gold box SSI game that I never, ever really beat. I remember finding the book and being like, "Cool! I played this game!" Then I found out there were two others, so I had to read them, too. I don't remember much from the series, to be honest, but the books are memorable to me for the simple fact that I made the connection that video games could be books, too!

You'd think that those books would start me down the road of reading copious amounts of Dungeons & Dragons, Forgotten Realms, and Dragonlance books ... but you'd be mistaken. I tried picking up some Dungeons & Dragons novels, but never really got into them. I think I may have tried to read another Dragonlance trilogy and kind of gave up on it. I never ventured into the Realms to read about Elminster or Drizzt, not even once.

The Bill, the Galactic Hero series was a random find at Borders back in the day. I remember finding the "Vol. 1" book, which turned out to be the second book in the series (which was confusing, to say the least), Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of Robot Slaves by Harry Harrison, stood out on the shelf. Upon reading the back of the book, I remember thinking of the RPG Paranoia and thinking this kind of satire was right up my alley. The books weren't hard reads, or long ones at that, but they were very enjoyable. They were tongue-and-cheek, and weren't afraid to parody things that I loved - like the movie Aliens in Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of Zombie Vampires. It's a series I read through once, and think I will read through again now that I have another 25 years of experience with which to interpret the stories of Bill, with two "L's."

The Mutant Chronicles is a universe that I stumbled upon when I read Frenzy, by John Allen Price. As it turned out, this was the second book of a trilogy, but I didn't know that until I made it to the end of the book and saw ads for the other two books. Nowhere on the cover of the book do I remember seeing anything about it being a "Book 2" in a series, or else I probably would have passed on it. I'm glad I started with the second book - it turned out to be the best in the series. I read the other two and found that I really liked the universe. I discovered that it was a RPG and board game, and it struck me as interesting. I'll talk more about the Mutant Chronicles in a later post, as my irrational love of it is long and well-documented. Needless to say, it would take almost 20 years before I was ever able to play in the Mutant Chronicles universe at Gen Con 2018.

On a brief tangent, there was a television show on the Sci-Fi Channel at the time called Sci-Fi Buzz. It was like Entertainment Tonight, but all about Sci-Fi movies and the like. I loved it. I watched it religiously. Turns out it was hosted by Mike Jerrick, and he lived in Lawrence and his daughter went to school with me. When I found that out later, it blew my mind. I mention Sci-Fi Buzz because they had a thing where you could call in and recommend something for others to read or watch or play, what have you, and I called in about the Mutant Chronicles novels, and they actually used it on the show. I had no idea they were going to use it at all. I was watching the show one Friday night and suddenly, my voice came on after the commercial break talking about the Mutant Chronicles books. It was cool for a teenager at the time to be a part of something like that, even if it was very much on the outer edge.

Apparently, the show is on YouTube.

Finally, there's Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson. This was a book that my brother told me about and I have ended up reading it several times over the years. The thing that sold me on the book was the first chapter where the main character, Hiro Protagonist (not a joke), is delivering pizzas for La Cosa Nostra Pizza, where you get your pizza in 30-minutes ... or else. It's a cyberpunk novel, and I'd truthfully love to see it made into a TV series one day. It weaved technology and mythology together in a fun and interesting way, and it's been one of my favorites for a long, long time.

This has just been a glimpse into this, and I'll try to talk more in-depth on each of these books/series in the future.