The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [61]
These were the years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the last spasm of the Wonder Bread Fifties, when imagination was suspect. Our parents were shocked speechless by the haircuts of the Beatles, a dance called the Twist, and women wearing pantsuits. (Although Lois's mother did break down and sew her some pantsuits during her college years, supposing they were better than miniskirts.) Except for The Twilight Zone, which Lois would sneak downstairs after her bedtime to watch, televised SF consisted of My Favorite Martian and Bewitched.
Fans, to us, were the girls who read movie magazines and were gaga over Doctor Kildare and Little Joe Cartwright.
Lois read, and passed on to me, Poul Anderson, A. E. van Vogt, Zenna Henderson, James Schmitz, Cordwainer Smith, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein (we thought Stranger in a Strange Land was racy, and were unduly impressed by this first exposure to "adult" content in SF). Conan Doyle and C. S. Forester we discovered together. And Tolkien's Lord of the Rings remains to this day one of our all-time favorite books.
We went to movies, from Lilies of the Field to Battle of the Bulge, from Wild in the Streets (anyone remember that?) to Goldfinger to Lawrence of Arabia—the latter implanting the image of the brooding hero permanently in our literary vocabularies. We followed Peter O'Toole from Lawrence to Becket, a story that much later influenced one of my own novels.
We wrote, turning out bits and pieces of poetry, fractions of stories, assuring ourselves that this was "practice" for "later on"—although just what "later on" was going to be, we were never able to articulate.
Lois did contribute to the school literary magazine, narrative poems that would have done Ogden Nash proud. One included the line "curses vitriolic," which ended up in the magazine as "curses nitriolic" because the typist couldn't read the copy and didn't know what vitriol was anyway.
I wish I could remember what Lois rhymed with "curses vitriolic."
We had an excellent history teacher, who not only confirmed our fascination with antiquity—the future being the trajectory of the past—but accepted with quizzical grace our habit of taking notes on one piece of paper and simultaneously writing a story on another. (This skill came in handy years later, when we found ourselves writing novels and minding children at the same time.)
Lois and I sat at the same desk during different periods in his class, and left penciled notes to each other on the wall—usually initials of the characters of the moment, including one named, presciently, "Riker." I was sitting at that desk when our principal announced the assassination of President Kennedy.
We duly moved on to the rarefied air of high school. Television produced The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Illya Kuryakin, an example of the sidekick being more interesting than the hero. (It's no accident that the head of Imperial Security on Barrayar is named lllyan.)
A Baskin-Robbins opened halfway between our houses. Some fantasies may be fueled by alcohol, but ours depended upon butterfat.
Still we wrote, isolated in dweebliness—my gosh, we read books that weren't assigned! Our heroes weren't the cheerleaders and the captain of the football team but English teachers. We each had one who not only critiqued whatever we wrote, in class or out, but unlike every other adult we knew never found anything suspect in our writings' fantastical content.
Fans, to us, were girls screaming at a Beatles concert, or men shouting at a football game.
Then, one fall, I returned home from a vacation to find Lois enthusing over a new television program, one that linked naturally into her years of reading science fiction.
I watched Star Trek. I fell for it too. Spock made intelligence classy. He was so cool, so—unattainable.