For all tomorrow's parties"
(Velvet Underground)
By the time I was in my second or third year in elementary school, things between my parents had definitely turned ugly. My father had a technique of his own for picking fights with other people, which he had especially fine tuned to work on my mother. He would single out a topic he knew his "opponent" held dear, a person such as a very close friend, or a deeply held belief, or anything he knew the other person would be emotionally attached to, and in a very cold and apparently detached tone of voice he would start to make increasingly offensive remarks about it, making exaggerated claims about the worthlessness of that person, the stupidity of that belief, or whatever, all of this stated as if it were an incontrovertible truth and a factual representation of reality rather than his own very twisted view. He would continue to escalate the provocation, by touching upon more and more delicate subjects, by casually mentioning having thrown away some precious personal belonging the other held especially dear because it was worthless, ugly to see, and always in the way, and so on, up until the point where the other would explode in a fit of rage. Then, claiming to be the innocent victim of a completely unprovoked verbal abuse, he would move on to accuse his opponent of being crazy, violent, and uncivilized and used this accusation as a justification for himself to behave in a manner that can precisely be described by those words. He was so pathologically scared of his own uncontrolled emotional behavior that he sought a way to project it onto others and pretend with himself that it was them and not he who were the abnormal ones. Sure enough, in the long run, the exposure to his continuous provocations was capable of drawing anyone to the brink of madness.
He was equipped with a large supply of excuses for starting fights. He had a unique capacity for despising things that did not fit into his own familiar world, from unusual (from his point of view) dietary restrictions to different philosophical and cultural habits, anything could at any time fall under his all too eager censorship. Since other people do sometime care about their own habits, culture, believes, as much as he would care to eliminate them, this would inevitably lead to continuous fights with anyone who would happen to spend a substantial amount of time in his company.
At some point, one of the favorite targets became my mother's innocent habit of occasionally reading science fiction. Up to that point I had not cared much about parental reading preferences, but when I repeatedly witnessed exceedingly abusive tirades during which my father threatened to throw away the meager collection of my mother's science fiction novels, I got interested in finding out what was going on. Having grown accustomed by then to being surrounded by books and having developed myself a strong emotional attachments to many of my early readings (like Klee's island of the magic squares I once mentioned before, which to this day still follows my many relocations around the world), I was horrified by the idea of somebody even conceiving to destroy another person's books. Being also by then well acquainted with my father's techniques of picking fights with my mother, I also understood that, if he said that it meant that those books meant something to my mother, so I decided I wanted to know more.
I didn't know what science fiction was until then, but immediately the idea of entertaining visions of the future of science was tremendously appealing to my imagination. Making educated guesses about new technologies that may exist in the future and setting them up inside scenarios of contacts with other worlds and travels across space and time, building worlds that were both alien and believable, combining flights of fancy with (at least an appearance of) scientific rigor: it all seemed marvelous. The fact that my literary taste was not developed enough at that age to notice the serious shortcomings of the genre in that respect certainly greatly enhanced this perception. What mostly contributed to my appreciation of science fiction, however, was probably primarily the fact of keeping a door open to a range of possible futures: escapism one may rightly call it, but when the conditions of your daily life do not look in the least desirable, isn't it better to court evasion into a scientifically and technologically advanced vision of humanity's future in space rather than falling in the grip of dubious dreams of improbable middle ages and princesses, or in the gutters of pitiful sugary romances? I defend my vision of the radiant future: even though the future depicted in science fiction is marred by catastrophes, postnuclear apocalypses, technologies run amok, nature destructive or destroyed, it still stretches the vision of humanity and its role in the world beyond the boundaries of our present time and civilization, towards broader horizons of diversity of life forms and environments. Even in its darkest forms, it is a constructive hope, one that speaks of human minds engaged in the struggle to understand the universe, which is what science is all about. It does not matter, or at least it did not matter to me at that age, that the science in science fiction stories is often defective (with laudable exceptions) or implausible to say the least. What matters is the image of the act of doing science as it is inevitably portrayed in a good part of the genre: its entanglement with the future of humanities, the dangers of its technological and human consequences, the thrill of pushing the boundaries of knowledge beyond its present limits. It has a Faustian appeal, no doubt, one that I would come to rationalize and appreciate much later, but it is certainly not surprising that it got me hooked at that early age and for several years afterwards, until my literary taste started to become too demanding, at least. I began through these early readings of science fiction, hidden away from the inquisitive and censorial paternal looks, to associate science with empowerment and freedom: an association that deeply influenced the later course of my life.
I began to appreciate the British school of eco-catastrophic futures, Ballard and his four-elements cycle; the dark humor of Douglas Adams and his "Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy"; Asimov's robotic futures and Foundation cycle, miniature voyages inside the human body; Clarke's contact stories suspended between Gaugin-like southern seas and the depths of space; Lem's impossible otherness of alien life. I dreamt of buried monolithic stones signaling to the stars, of sentient oceans reading our deepest selves, of immense computers, cryogenic voyages, and amoeba-like creatures swallowing midwest American villages. I was simply dreaming the collective dreams of the age: nuclear fires, flying saucers; Cold War monsters agitated by a very real and nearby intramural war superimposed over the visions of the world at large, caught like I was in a precarious equilibrium of ominous and brutal forces, genies of destruction ready to be release without warning. Duck and cover, or else escape into the consoling fantasy of the existence of not one but many futures, of science as a way to control the dark forces of nature, to overcome the evil djinns. It was not the escape into dissociation, so common to the children caught up in impossible fights they're unable to endure or to escape, but more a sense of struggle to build one of those many futures, one where the logic and intuition of discovery would be dominating over the obscurantist intransigence of certainties that surrounded me.
