Jan. 1st, 2010 08:47 pm
Bookending
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
textualdevianceI just closed a chapter in my life. Fitting, I suppose, to do so on this day.
My first introduction to SF/F, courtesy of my dad, was reading one of the I, Robot stories (Robbie.) Don't remember exactly how old I was at the time--10 or 11, maybe--but it did give me the jones for something more, so he handed over some of his Alan Dean Foster books. I don't remember which one I read first (may have been a short story collection or one of the Spellsinger books), but somewhere in those early days, I picked up For Love of Mother-Not, the (chronologically) first book in the Flinx and Pip series.
Within a year, I'd become so hooked on Foster's worlds that I felt compelled to write him a letter (and he wrote back! Woot!) and have since devoured most of the stuff he's written, outside of the movie novelizations he does for the paychecks.
Foster may not be the grandest genre writer of all time or anything, but his stories are fun, with interesting, believable characters and satisfying plots. A good introduction for someone my age at the time, and something easy for me to pick up and put down as mental and practical bandwidth has allowed over the years.
His Commonwealth universe (in which the Flinx and Pip stories are set) comprises a large portion of his catalog. He's been writing on it for decades--since the first Flinx book in 1974--and has developed a massive set of various backstories for the worlds and creatures therein.
The Flinx and Pip stories, however, were always the throughline, and in recent years, he's made a point of drawing them closer and closer to a Big Story that would complete their arc. Last year, he finally did this, with Flinx Transcendant.
Because of the move, I hadn't yet had the time to finish this--I'd been reading it in fits and starts for months--but I finally got a chance to get through the last few chapters this evening. While not his best work, the book is nonetheless a very, very satisfying tying-up of a thousand different threads he'd set in motion over the course of the time he's been writing in this universe.
And as such, it's also a tying-up for me, too.
Folks who were older when they started his stuff, or younger when they finished it, might not get what this means to me. Hundreds of writers have written long, involved series and created large-scale worlds. Some have even done so over the course of decades, as Foster has done.
But his particular work debuted in my life at a critical point--when I was graduating from Oz and Trixie Belden to more-mature work--and has continued for so long that it really has been a key touchstone in my mental and cultural development. It's as much a part of my childhood as Star Wars and Star Trek were (and are) to many of my generation, and yet has also continued to speak to me as an adult in a way that the newer versions of those worlds didn't do for us.
I've read and enjoyed many other series in this time, of course--Pratchett, Asprin, Jacques, Rice, etc.--but I didn't grow up with those books the way I've grown up with the Commonwealth. Flinx's journey has been a thread of my mental life for so many years now that it almost seems as if it's a story of my own (that the story covers his life from early adolescence to the completion of young adulthood also reinforces that feeling.) 27 years of my life have been punctuated by periodic returns to what he's been up to, like a childhood friend with whom I never really lost touch, so to finish his story is almost like saying goodbye to that friend.
Yet somehow, it's not melancholy. It was a satisfying enough end to the story that I don't feel a sense of loss. It feels, instead, more like graduating or something. Like saying goodbye to childhood, and moving on to the next phase. (Of course, given that I'm turning 39 this year, childhood isn't exactly a recent thing!) Reading these stories has been a unique experience in my life, and something I'm grateful for (and especially grateful to the author!) and I'm glad I could be there on this journey.
I only hope that maybe my own kid(s) can someday have a similar experience with someone else's stories.
My first introduction to SF/F, courtesy of my dad, was reading one of the I, Robot stories (Robbie.) Don't remember exactly how old I was at the time--10 or 11, maybe--but it did give me the jones for something more, so he handed over some of his Alan Dean Foster books. I don't remember which one I read first (may have been a short story collection or one of the Spellsinger books), but somewhere in those early days, I picked up For Love of Mother-Not, the (chronologically) first book in the Flinx and Pip series.
Within a year, I'd become so hooked on Foster's worlds that I felt compelled to write him a letter (and he wrote back! Woot!) and have since devoured most of the stuff he's written, outside of the movie novelizations he does for the paychecks.
Foster may not be the grandest genre writer of all time or anything, but his stories are fun, with interesting, believable characters and satisfying plots. A good introduction for someone my age at the time, and something easy for me to pick up and put down as mental and practical bandwidth has allowed over the years.
His Commonwealth universe (in which the Flinx and Pip stories are set) comprises a large portion of his catalog. He's been writing on it for decades--since the first Flinx book in 1974--and has developed a massive set of various backstories for the worlds and creatures therein.
The Flinx and Pip stories, however, were always the throughline, and in recent years, he's made a point of drawing them closer and closer to a Big Story that would complete their arc. Last year, he finally did this, with Flinx Transcendant.
Because of the move, I hadn't yet had the time to finish this--I'd been reading it in fits and starts for months--but I finally got a chance to get through the last few chapters this evening. While not his best work, the book is nonetheless a very, very satisfying tying-up of a thousand different threads he'd set in motion over the course of the time he's been writing in this universe.
And as such, it's also a tying-up for me, too.
Folks who were older when they started his stuff, or younger when they finished it, might not get what this means to me. Hundreds of writers have written long, involved series and created large-scale worlds. Some have even done so over the course of decades, as Foster has done.
But his particular work debuted in my life at a critical point--when I was graduating from Oz and Trixie Belden to more-mature work--and has continued for so long that it really has been a key touchstone in my mental and cultural development. It's as much a part of my childhood as Star Wars and Star Trek were (and are) to many of my generation, and yet has also continued to speak to me as an adult in a way that the newer versions of those worlds didn't do for us.
I've read and enjoyed many other series in this time, of course--Pratchett, Asprin, Jacques, Rice, etc.--but I didn't grow up with those books the way I've grown up with the Commonwealth. Flinx's journey has been a thread of my mental life for so many years now that it almost seems as if it's a story of my own (that the story covers his life from early adolescence to the completion of young adulthood also reinforces that feeling.) 27 years of my life have been punctuated by periodic returns to what he's been up to, like a childhood friend with whom I never really lost touch, so to finish his story is almost like saying goodbye to that friend.
Yet somehow, it's not melancholy. It was a satisfying enough end to the story that I don't feel a sense of loss. It feels, instead, more like graduating or something. Like saying goodbye to childhood, and moving on to the next phase. (Of course, given that I'm turning 39 this year, childhood isn't exactly a recent thing!) Reading these stories has been a unique experience in my life, and something I'm grateful for (and especially grateful to the author!) and I'm glad I could be there on this journey.
I only hope that maybe my own kid(s) can someday have a similar experience with someone else's stories.
Tags: