Tag: Chapter: 1965-1976

1976

Posted on by Brian Hall

On September 3, 1976—the day Viking 2 touched down successfully on the surface of Mars—I bellied up to a registration table in a hotel in Kansas City, Missouri, to receive my name tag and program book for MidAmeriCon, the 34th World Science Fiction Convention. I was seventeen years old. Other than Jennifer Vozoff, with whom I had held hands on the school bus three days running when I was in third grade, I had not yet had a girlfriend.

I was a devoted reader of science fiction, but I had never been to a science fiction convention. Standing outside the Imperial Ballroom, waiting to get into the Opening Ceremonies, I looked around at the attendees, mostly male, and thought, What a bunch of unattractive geeks and social outcasts. (I would discover later that many male science fiction fans think this when first encountering other male science fiction fans.) The fellow I mainly recall had the signature unwashed, scraggly hair and was playing parodic tunes of his own invention on a portable keyboard powered by his breath. Whenever he removed the flexible hose from his mouth, a quarter cup of saliva would dribble over the mouthpiece. He called himself Filthy Pierre.

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HO train set

Posted on by Brian Hall

Sure, we had one. My siblings and I got it when I was maybe eight. We had just enough tracks to make an oval with a siding, or a figure eight. We had a New York Central engine and a coal car, a boxcar loaded with finest quality Lehigh portland cement, a tanker carrying hydrocarbon rocket fuel (how cool is that?) and, of course, a red, red caboose.

Being the family nerd and control freak, I was the one who mainly played with it. From plastic model kits I made farm buildings, mills, depots, factories, stations. I didn’t go in much for houses. I couldn’t construct a landscape—I assembled the tracks and dispersed the buildings on the pinewood floor of an upstairs hall and always had to put everything back in boxes when I was done, because of foot traffic. I never made up stories about the workers or the train passengers, I just arranged the buildings in different configurations, then drove my Matchbox cars down the notional streets. (Later, I turned into a novelist attentive to structure and weak on plot.)

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Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

Posted on by Brian Hall

The first time I saw the City of Tomorrow I was five years old. It was 1965. I had been taken by my parents to the New York World’s Fair. I sat next to my mother in a plastic molded chair on a conveyor belt in GM’s Futurama and watched the City float by like a dream. Its projected date was 2024. It was everything I wanted, but I didn’t know why.

The second time I saw the City of Tomorrow I was ten years old. I must have chattered—I was always a chatterer—to my parents about my hazy five-year-old memories, because for Christmas that year they gave me The World of Tomorrow, by Kenneth K. Goldstein. This 1969 volume in McGraw-Hill’s “International Library” for young readers borrows heavily from GM’s Futurama installation for its photographs and illustrations.

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A music playlist for The Stone Loves the World

Posted on by Brian Hall

Largehearted Boy is a marvelous site where authors are asked to create a music playlist for their books, accompanied by a paragraph or two explaining the reason for each selection.  Links are provided to the relevant recordings.  It’s hugely fun to wander around the site, discovering what music has inspired which writer for whatever reason.  I provided a list for The Stone Loves the World, and you can access it here.

Bathing with thunder lizard

Posted on by Brian Hall

Back when I and my two siblings were small enough to share a bathtub, our parents bought each of us a dinosaur-shaped bar of soap. I got a Brontosaurus, my older brother got a Tyrannosaurus rex, and my younger sister got a Triceratops. There was probably nothing random about this. My parents considered my older brother aggressive, my younger sister defensive, and me placid. My visual memory of that slate-blue bar of soap is still vivid. As I used it (sparingly, to preserve it as long as I could) the pleasing round smoothness of the neck, tail and legs just kept getting rounder and smoother and more pleasing.

Had I already loved and identified with Brontosaurus? It wouldn’t surprise me if my attachment began right then, as I placidly accepted the designation my parents assigned me. But then again, loads of kids love Brontosaurus; way more than Diplodocus or Apatosaurus, who look basically the same. I assume it’s because the meaning of Brontosaurus, which books always mentioned—“Thunder Lizard”—is way cooler than “Deceptive Lizard” (Apatosaurus) or “Double-Beamed” (Diplodocus), which has something to do with the shape of the tail vertebrae, but really, who could care. Continue reading “Bathing with thunder lizard”

Driving Matchbox cars responsibly

Posted on by Brian Hall

In 1965, when I was six, my parents started giving me Matchbox cars. I would get two or three on each birthday and another two or three at Christmas. I began to save my fifteen-cent-a-week allowance for them. One car cost fifty cents at the Woolworth’s, a ten-minute walk from my house. For my eighth birthday I got an Official Matchbox Collector’s Case that could hold 48 cars. Two years later I got an Official Deluxe Collector’s Case that could hold 72 cars.

I did the usual things: I drove them down the lanes of the pine floor boards in my bedroom; I lifted and dropped a blanket on my bed to create humps and folds that became hills and hill roads; I combined them with an HO train set and HO scale model houses I’d built from kits, turning left and right on notional streets, crossing the tracks safely after the train went by. I never caused them to crash down the stairs, and I always put them away in the two cases when I was done. Continue reading “Driving Matchbox cars responsibly”