When I was little, my parents would tell my brother and I bedtime stories almost every night. When it was my dad's turn, he would draw from the science fiction stories he'd read growing up.
For years, I fell asleep to retellings of Skylark of Space, Lensman, and Spacehounds of IPC (no surprises there, as E.E. Smith was my dad's favorite author). This ignited within me a certain sci-fi curiosity that my parents were happy to indulge with television, including classic Doctor Who, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and more.
Through the somewhat inaccurate haze of childhood memory, I recall trips to the attic when my parents would dig out holiday decorations or winter clothes. Time passes differently for kids, because I remember these trips taking hours. In all likelihood we were never up there for more than an thirty minutes or so. But on more than one of these attic excursions, I found boxes of my dad's old paperback science fiction novels.
Even faded by time, the cover art was brilliant, colorful and compelling. While my parents rummaged around in frustration (nothing was ever labeled quite right), I'd drink in the cover art, brush my fingers across the crisscrosses of creases and folds, and flip through the yellowed pages, sometimes sampling a paragraph or two.
While I was old enough to read, I wasn't patient enough to process adult fiction, even the pulpy sci-fi of yesteryear. But if it had a really cool cover or an interesting logline, I'd set it aside and ask my dad to read it, then tell me about it.
Those tactile attic experiences stick with me to this day. My dad instilled within me an enduring love for science fiction that, in no small part, led me down the path of writing Spacewalker. There is something fascinating and compelling--perhaps even intoxicating--about the possibility of writing something so moving or meaningful or entertaining to someone that they never let go of it. That, even after they've experienced it and put it out of their minds, it lingers on a shelf or in a box in the attic, waiting to be rediscovered.
I want that for what I've written.
But even in my wildest dreams of success, I'm not sure I'll ever have it, because of the prevalence of digital books. I have complicated feelings about e-books and audiobooks, mostly because they lack that tactile-ness I recall so fondly. But they are undeniably convenient, and, hypocrite that I am, most of what I've read this year has been in a digital format.
It's an absurd comparison, but if I'd discovered boxes of novels on floppy disk all those years ago, would I have been so captivated? Would I instead fondly remember the textured plastic, faded labels, and springy click of the metal shutters? Somehow, I doubt it, and even that's a far cry from the worst case of what the next generation of children may experience. What we leave behind might very well be slabs of metal and glass, loaded with apps and filled with titles locked to specific user accounts.
And I guess maybe that's okay, so long as literature can still be preserved, passed down, and shared. But it will be different, and the nostalgia I'm overcome with recently abhors it.