Cheap Sci-Fi

I really dig science fiction. Specifically, I like cheap, used science fiction paperbacks. I love combing thrift stores for sci-fi. I think it's sweet scoring a bunch of cheap sci-fi at garage sales. Fifty-cent book racks outside of bookstores make me happy, and actually going inside a used bookstore with a good science fiction section makes my head spin with awesomeness. If the pickings are scarce, as in the case of thrift stores and the like, I tend to just grab any sci-fi paperbacks that are older than I am and not terribly long (my attention span is short; I'm unlikely to ever read a single Dune novel); if there is sci-fi aplenty, I tend to pick by length first, cover second, and price third. The most expensive books I buy are still just a few bucks, about half of what a new mass-market paperback book costs.

I love cheap sci-fi for a bunch of reasons. I love the price, because by my calculations I'm paying mere pennies per hour of entertainment. I love the smell the smell of old books. I love discovering things long forgotten and out of print, and I love finding classics from big names for next to nothing. And I'm a nerd who likes science fiction.

I like hard science fiction, rooted in actual science, and I love fantastic, completely unrealistic science fiction. Indeed, part of the appeal of some cheap sci-fi is its shlockiness. I tend to lean towards rockets and spacemen sci-fi rather than sword and sorcery fantasy, but I've always had a fondness for speculative fiction in general, and I sometimes use sci-fi as a blanket term for the whole gamut of genres encompassed.

There are so many books that I've read and forgotten. There are so many fragments of sci-fi books in my head, unattached to any title, author, or even storyline. There are so many good books with stories that I remember quite well, even though I have no recollection of what those books were called or who wrote them. There are great books that I can't recall the names of, but I can recall the authors. What the hell is that Harry Harrison book, the first part of a trilogy, that's a lot like 1984, with a dude, aided by a network of underground conspirators, running from a corrupt government and their massive web of oppressive lies? 'Cause that one was kickass!

To help myself remember the books I read, and to share my geeky passion with the interwebs, I started a blog called Cheap Sci-Fi. You can check it out at http://cheapscifi.blogspot.com . Should you feel the need to purchase one of the books I've read, there are links to buy the books, but you really should just go find your own. There is an overwhelming abundance of cheap sci-fi out there for the finding. I'm not one for having a bunch of stuff, so if you know me in real life I'll give you any of the books I've already read if I still have them.

Should you find yourself in a used bookstore, checking out their sci-fi section and being unsure of what to buy, I've got two words for you: Ace Doubles. Bigger stores have sections of them, and smaller stores have them mixed in with the rest of the books. They're easy to spot, though. Just look for the books with the blue and red spines. The stories tend to be great, and the books themselves are super rad: each one is two books stuck together, so you read one and then flip it over and read the other one starting from the other side. The covers are sweet, too, and you get two of them. They're really expensive compared to some of the other stuff I buy, but that just means they cost a few bucks. A store in a heavy foot traffic area will charge more than one on a less-traveled street, but I still only ever pay around three dollars for them.

Also in the category of cheap sci-fi is the science fiction magazine. When I had a shitty desk job, these things really helped fill the hours. The fact that they're full of short stories made them perfect for my short attention span and the, uh, "downtime". My desk was full of them. I even wrote a song about them. Seriously, if you sit at a desk all day, you should get subscriptions to both Analogand Asimov. They're a little more expensive than old, used paperbacks, but they're still pretty damn cheap, and still super awesome. I also really like Weird Talesand the horror rag Cemetery Dance, though they're relatively expensive.

I've read a lot of books and a lot of stories. I've read all kinds of shit, but I always come back to the science fiction. I guess maybe I've just always been a nerd, but I've always loved the stuff. And I love it even more when it's cheap. Cheap sci-fi rules.

We don't have Flubber, but we have Blubber.

I used to go to the library regularly in fourth and fifth grade, mostly to browse the science fiction section. The library was a tiny, one-room building crammed with books. The head librarian, the only person there most of the time, was a very old, wrinkled, hunched-over lady who moved and spoke slowly.

One day, while I was perusing the scifi shelf, a girl who was roughly my age came in with her mom. Clearly unfamiliar with both card catalogs and the "alphabetical by author" system of shelving fiction, she immediately went to the librarian and asked if the library had a copy of Forever.

"Well, I know we have Blubber," she said, shuffling over to the young adult section, "but I don't know if we have Flubber."

"Forever," the girl said, following the librarian.

"Yes, yes, I know we have Blubber, but I don't know about Flubber," she replied, leaning close to the shelf and eyeballing books.

"Forever," the girl said again, "not Flubber."

"I don't know if we have that. I know we definitely have Blubber, though. Do you know who it's by?"

"Forever," she said again, clearly frustrated by this point, "by Judy Blume."

"Ah, yes," the librarian said, pulling down a copy of Blubber, also by Judy Blume, off of the shelf for the girl. "We have this one, Blubber, I don't see Flubber here, though."

"I'm not looking for Blubber or Flubber," the girl told the librarian. "I'm looking for Forever."

The librarian finally understood what she was saying. "Oh," she said, suddenly much less enthusiastic. "We got rid of that because it had some overnight stuff," she said in what sounded like a disgusted tone as she shelved the book. The girl stormed out without saying another word, and her mom thanked the librarian for her help before following.

I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find out that the book is still unavailable in that backwards little town.

"I don't read."

I've always been a fan of recreational reading. At a very young age, I was scouring the children's section of the library for any books featuring monsters. By fourth grade, I had become an avid science fiction fan. In sixth grade I read so much that my total grade in reading class was more than two hundred percent. It would have been even higher had I chosen to only read books that were on the teacher's list of books we could read for credit, but there simply wasn't a great enough selection to hold my interest, and my pleas for additions were met with, "Well, that's a little advanced for this class." To this day, I find myself reading for the sheer hell of it very regularly. The only gap in my literary history was eighth grade, when I became too cool to read.

The friends I had made in junior high were, for the most part, fantasy nerds . In fact, most of my friendships were formed simply by being noticed carrying around Dungeons and Dragons books. In my circle, there was no stigma against the hopelessly nerdy books that we were fond of, and certainly none against reading in general.

When I went to a different school in eighth grade, though, things were different. My new friends were more trouble makers than nerds, and we filled our time by playing with cigarette lighters and making fun of people, rather than engaging in any activity that required too much thought. Our heroes were Beavis and Butt-head, who were funny then but so much funnier now that I realize they were making fun of the young idiots that we all were. When I carried around my Dungeons and Dragons Rules Cyclopedia, my best friend asked, "You know that's, like, the nerd encyclopedia, right?" I promptly stopped carrying it around.

One day in English class, our teacher brought us to the library. My friend was flirting with the librarian, a girl a year older than us, and asked if we could see the "request only" books, which I didn't even know existed. She let us come behind the counter and look at a rolling shelf of books that weren't kept with the rest because of their controversial natures. It was sort of a stupid idea, because it just drew attention to the books and made us more interested in them than we otherwise would have been. Had this not been in a very conservative and oppressively religious area, I would have suspected that it was just a ploy to get kids interested in reading. (I guess that could have been a possibility, as I don't remember who the librarian was at the time, only the crazy, power-mad and angry woman who later replaced her.) I decided to check out a book from the shelf. Among the books about serial killers and Satanism, I found a copy of Stephen King's The Dark Tower. I hadn't really read much Stephen King, but I remembered hearing some of my nerdier friends raving about this book the year before, so I checked it out.

My neighbor was a kid named Rick. I used to go over to his house after school sometimes and we'd ride his 4-wheeler to the gas station, where he'd buy us a bunch of candy, and then we'd go set things on fire or play video games. On the bus, we'd listen to gangsta rap through one headphone each connected to his CD player. Rick was a popular guy, and he was my link to the coolest kids. I was no longer a nerd, but I was far from being the most popular kid in school, so it was good that I could call Rick a friend. People knew I was awesome when I walked into school with him. In fact, people initially thought I was his younger brother when I started attending that school. He was Mexican, and I'm Filipino and white, but dark is dark when you're in the middle-of-nowhere, Indiana. Rick was popular enough that he was even admired by racists who would call me a "spick" and a "beaner." One asshole, Kevin, who claimed to be in the KKK and had threatened to "get me after school" if I didn't get rid of the anti-Nazi patch on my backpack, told Rick, "You know, I don't really like spicks, but you're alright!" Rick considered this a compliment, and considered Kevin alright, too. Rick was just a cool guy, and everybody liked him.

Rick wasn't the only awesome kid on my bus, though. There was another, Josh, who was a year older than us, and was way cool. He was on the football team, popular as all hell, and was just simply cool as shit. His whole family was really popular and heavily involved in the various school athletic programs. Their dad owned a grocery store, and their family was considered hot shit in the school and in the area. Unfortunately, I wasn't cool enough to talk to him. Rick was, though.

One morning on the bus, I was showing Rick the forbidden book I had checked out from the library. He was impressed by the illustrations, particularly one of a dead guy hanging from a noose, and another of a child being attacked by monsters. When Josh got on the bus, Rick tried to show him the book.

"Hey," he said, "Check out this crazy book he has!"

"No," he said, to Rick but not to me, since he didn't talk to me. "I don't read!" he said, rolling his eyes and making me feel like the biggest dork in the world. I shrunk into my seat. How would people ever think I was cool if I enjoyed such lame activities as reading? I put the book in my backpack and sat silently for the rest of the ride while Rick talked to Josh, no doubt about things much cooler than a nerd like myself could possibly imagine.

My family used to make regular trips to a big library about 40 minutes away from where we lived. It was outside of our county, so my parents had to pay some kind of fee to be able to use that library, but it was worth it since we lived in a tiny town with a tiny one-room library. Until that point, I had really enjoyed going there and feeding my brain. After I realized how lame it was to read, though, I wanted nothing to do with the place. I'd protest going, but would be forced to go, anyway. When we'd go there, I'd go sit in front of one of the TVs in the media room and watch MTV, hoping to catch a glimpse of my heroes, Beavis and Butt-head.

At some point my mom asked me why I didn't go looking for something to read.

"I don't read!" I said, trying to sound as cool as Josh did when he said it.

"What?" my mom asked, aghast that I had said such a thing. "Where did you learn that?"

As my mom scolded me, I realized how stupid it was to be anti-reading. Still, for a while after that, I wouldn't let myself get caught carrying around recreational reading material at school.

Bill and Ted teach vocabularity.

My uncle brought my cousins and I to see Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure when I was eight years old, introducing me to two characters who I knew were completely awesome simply by the way they spoke. Years before Wayne's World, Bill and Ted were teaching kids to speak in a manner both impressive to their peers and bewildering to adults. By the time the sequel came out, my friends had turned me on to the smooth musical stylings of heavy metal, the preference of both Bill and Ted, so I was even more enamoured by the duo. I decided to do everything within my power to become as excellent as they were. Everything in my power turned out to be emulating their parlance by speaking in a stoner drawl and adopting their vocabulary, the meaning of their words derived only by the context in which they were used. To my friends in fifth grade, I sounded like a sly badass. To the educated adults around me, I sounded like a damn fool.

One day, a classmate of mine named Keith was telling me about some tragic events that had recently befallen his cousin. Keith was a compulsive liar, and by this time I knew of the fact because I had made up the name of an imaginary rap group that I supposedly listened to all the time, and he had told me that he had a bunch of their tapes. Still, I gave him the benefit of the doubt while listening to his tale. Keith told me about how his cousin had been sitting in his living room one night when a bullet had flown throw the window and into his face. He was still alive, but obviously not doing as well as he could have been on account of having been shot in the face. I seized the opportunity to demonstrate my excellent lexicon.

"Bogus," I said, indicating my displeasure with the notion of his cousin being shot in the face.

"No," said our teacher, who was sitting at her desk and listening in on our conversation. "That's not bogus at all. It's very real."

"Oh," I said, caught off guard. I thought for a moment and then pulled some more of Bill and Ted's vocabulary out of my bag of tricks. "That is non non non non non non non non heinous," I said, adding extra nons because the situation was extra terrible.

"No," said our teacher, "It's very heinous."

"Oh," I said, and then remained silent. From that point on, I only imitated Bill and Ted when safely out of the earshot of adults, who I guessed simply weren't cool enough to know what the hell I was saying.

Don't believe in Science Fiction.

When I was in fifth grade, I used to go to the local library about once a week. It was an incredibly tiny building near the elementary school, and had only one room full of books. Each time I went there, I would head straight to the back of the building, where a lone shelf held the library's science fiction section. I had no real interest in reading anything else at all at that point, except for Dungeons and Dragons books that the library didn't carry.

My grandma was visiting one weekend and offered to take me to the library. Always anxious to feed my head with tales of interplanetary adventures, I happily agreed. As usual, when we got there, I perused the science fiction shelf. On this particular day, I couldn't seem to find anything particularly interesting, save a series of books that looked like it would be an undertaking to read in their entirety. The books were thick, heavy tomes, and there were a lot of them, enough to fill up an entire row of shelving. I had always noticed them, but had never felt up to the task of reading the whole thing. Since I couldn't find anything else to read, I decided I may as well give it a shot. I figured if it was good, it would be something to keep me entertained for a long time. I checked out the first book in the series.

On the ride back home, my grandma looked at the book sitting in my lap, and began to tell me about how the book wasn't true.

"It's just somebody's opinion," she said, "and you shouldn't believe it."

"I know," I said, wondering why she would think that I would take science fiction as fact. She talked for a while longer about how some people believe things that aren't true, and that I should never believe something just because I read it in a book.

I didn't realize until years later that the reason she was probably telling me not to believe what I read in that book was because she recognized the name of the author. At the time, I didn't know that L. Ron Hubbard was anything other than a science fiction writer. My grandmother, a very deeply religious woman, had probably read warnings about Hubbard's money-making cult, Scientology, and wanted to make sure I didn't end up believing in it. The irony is that many years later, she would send me a Christian inspirational novel in an effort to win me over to Jesus. Too bad I was taught not to believe everything I read.

I didn't read more than 30 pages of the book I checked out. It turned out that despite being able to write a series that filled up a whole shelf, L. Ron Hubbard just wasn't a very good science fiction writer.

I ain't writing nothing.

Eighth grade was probably one of my most obnoxious years, likely in large part due to the fact that I had just transferred to a new school and immediately made friends with a bunch of real assholes. I used to get in trouble for stupid stuff all the time, like having a lighter in class for no reason (I didn't smoke), throwing bendy rubber action figures off of a balcony, vandalism, and just being a general disruption in class. The only time during the day when I wasn't an annoying little cretin was in English class. My teacher was a mean, angry old woman who seemed to despise kids, and everybody was terrified of her, including myself.

Mrs. Nancy absolutely hated me, and would consistently write that I was a disruption in class on every single report card. It was total bullshit, because I was scared of her and never made a sound in class. Her class was the only class that I would do all my homework in, because she had a policy of giving detention to everybody who missed an assignment, but I would still always end up with a D in her class. She graded my papers like a spiteful child, and gave me a D on absolutely everything I wrote, despite the fact that teachers before her and teachers after her had told me that I wrote well. She would mark points off for incredibly stupid things, like a person using a contraction in dialogue, or using "too many words." During peer-review sessions, some of my classmates work would strike me as semi-illiterate, but they didn't do nearly as badly as I did. She once even gave me an F on a final draft because she claimed I had written it in some sort of magical uneraseable blue pencil instead of a pen, even though it was completely obvious that it was written in ink.

One time we were reading a play in class, and she had us taking turns standing up and reading parts in front of the class. I had just finished reading a line when she interrupted the performance.

"How absolutely rude!" she said, scowling. She was looking directly at me. Another student later told me that I looked completely baffled, and I was, because I knew I hadn't done anything rude. She accused me of rolling my eyes, and sent me out into the hallway to copy pages from the dictionary for the rest of the class.

One of my asshole friends and I had a study hall directly before her class. We regularly caused disruptions in there and would have to be held after class, usually only for a minute or two of the five minute passing-period between class. On one occasion, we were held longer than five minutes for an extended lecture on being a decent human being, and then our teacher walked us to Mrs. Nancy's class so that we wouldn't need a hall pass or get marked as tardy, which was another thing Mrs. Nancy would have given us detention for.

When she brought us to class, everybody was taking a quiz, which had to be taken in pencil. I asked Mrs. Nancy if I could sharpen my pencil, because the one I had was brand new and thus couldn't be used.

"Absolutely not!" she hissed.

So I just sat there and didn't take my quiz.

"OK, you can sharpen your pencil," she said a few minutes later. "Actually, go out in the hall."

I went out into the hall, and she came out and told me I would have to write "I will remember to always be prepared for class" one hundred times and give them to her before school started the next day. She then let me go sharpen my pencil and take my quiz.

Having done nothing wrong to begin with, I didn't write the sentences. During study hall the next day, the secretary in the office announced over the intercom that I had to go the Mrs. Nancy's class.

"Do you have my sentences?" she asked when I got to her class.

"No," I said.

"Well, stand in front of the class and write them. Now."

"I ain't writing nothing," I said, angry and deliberately trying to inflame her grammar nerve. The class in session burst into laughter, which sent her flying into a rage.

"You think that's funny? You're all staying a minute after class!" she yelled. She looked me up and down with a disgusted look on her face. "You just stand there, then."

She walked to the back of the class where her desk was, and I sat down on the floor.

"I said stand!" she yelled.

"No, I think I'd rather sit," I said. The class laughed again.

"OK, that's two minutes after class! Paul, come with me!" she said, walking out into the hall. I followed her, and she got very close to my face.

"I don't know what you think you're doing. Are you trying to impress your friends?"

"No, I just didn't do anything wrong, so I'm not going to write those sentences."

"I have never seen such a display of insubordination!"

She brought me back into class, where I sat back down on the floor, and went to her desk and filled out a disciplinary referral. When she was finished, she gave it to me and sent me to the office.

When I got to the office, I gave them the referral, and then waited until the vice principal was ready to talk to me. When he called me into his office, I explained to him exactly what had happened and why I had behaved like that in her class. I was pretty confident I was going to get detention or Saturday school, which I was used to at the time. Instead, he told me to write the sentences, not so much as punishment for my original non-crime, but as punishment for making everyone laugh at the mean old lady.

By the end of high school, she was the head librarian instead of a teacher, but she continued to be a hateful old lady.