{"id":240,"date":"2011-10-29T18:27:26","date_gmt":"2011-10-29T23:27:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stefoff.com\/?p=240"},"modified":"2019-12-01T14:44:25","modified_gmt":"2019-12-01T22:44:25","slug":"rereading-a-childhood-memory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stefoff.com\/?p=240","title":{"rendered":"Rereading an early sf favorite"},"content":{"rendered":"

The late, great S.J. Perelman wrote a series of marvelous essays under the rubric “Cloudland Revisited,” in which he reread books or rescreened movies he’d loved as a child or young man. His reactions to revisiting these cherished icons often surprised him. You can do no better than to look up a few of these pieces–I’m especially fond of “It Takes Two to Tango, But Only One to Squirm,” which recounts the experience of watching The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse <\/em>after many years.<\/p>\n

Just last week, courtesy of Interlibrary Loan, I revisited a puffy little cloud of my own.<\/p>\n

\n

After discovering sf in the 5th grade I tore through every science-fiction book in my school library. One was The Star Seekers<\/em>, by Milton Lesser (the sf pen name of Stephen Marlowe, who wrote mysteries). I may have read it twice, because a few scenes remained vivid. It was my first exposure to the gen-ship premise: the story of a young man who sets out to explore his world, only to learn that his world is not what he thinks it is.<\/p>\n

\"star-seekers-title\"<\/p>\n

So I picked up the book at my branch library, poured myself a foaming flagon of Diet Mountain Dew, and set out to tread once more the path followed by young Mikal, the hero. Turns out I had remembered the Hero’s Journey pretty accurately but forgotten a lot of tedious stuff, such as the author\u2019s frequent scorn-heaping on candy, soda, and TV. (He didn’t say anything about Diet Dew.) Nor had I realized as a kid that the \u201cscience\u201d part of this particular science fiction novel is pretty shaky.<\/p>\n

The Star Seekers<\/em> didn’t hold up as well as other early favorites that I still love, including Jack Vance\u2019s\u00a0Vandals of the Void<\/em> and Dan Wickenden\u2019s\u00a0The Amazing Vacation<\/em>. Still, it was fun to read it again, and thanks to Interlibrary Loan I didn’t have to pony up $75 to buy it online. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The late, great S.J. Perelman wrote a series of marvelous essays under the rubric “Cloudland Revisited,” in which he reread books or rescreened movies he’d loved as a child or young man. His reactions to revisiting these cherished icons often surprised him. You can do no better than to look up a few of these […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,12],"tags":[42,45],"class_list":["post-240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading","category-specfic","tag-reading","tag-specfic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefoff.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefoff.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefoff.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefoff.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefoff.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=240"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/stefoff.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":785,"href":"https:\/\/stefoff.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240\/revisions\/785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefoff.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefoff.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefoff.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}