“Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.”
― Aristotle, The Philosophy of Aristotle
I don’t suppose there are too many 60 year-olds who can find documented evidence from 90% of their lifetime ago and discover that they were writing fan fiction. Helping my elderly mother clear out some drawers of old family memorabilia, I recently came across a booklet I had produced in 1966 (or thereabouts) which showed that my earliest surviving fan fiction was not Star Trek, Thunderbirds, UFO, McMillan and Wife or The Night Stalker. My earliest fic – holy jemoly! – was the Batman TV series.
Diversity starts early. In my case, having learnt to read before I even arrived at school, I recall reading Black Beauty from cover to cover, along with my mother’s assistance, at the age of four. When I began school, I was placed in a large class of children for whom reading was otherwise a largely alien concept. At recess and lunchtime, while the majority of my male classmates were learning to kick a football, my mixed-gender peer group busied itself playing elastics or role-playing ‘Lost in Space’, and generally not conforming to the stereotype of 1960s Aussie school kids. That peer group later grew up to mature into a collection of gay men, lesbians, cross dressers, and other diverse characters. They all loved science fiction from an early age.
As a teenager, while my male school friends were out playing footy (or other sport) every Saturday afternoon, I was curled up on my bed reading the latest Asimov or other science fiction paperback novel that I had purchased with that week’s pocket money. Such an intellectual investment has long-term implications: as an adult, I have more books in my house than any other item.
My passion for writing also began at an early age: the above photo features the front of a four-page booklet that I produced in the mid-1960s modeled on the Batman TV series – and in which a friend rather kindly suggested recently that I showed a better understanding of narrative structure at age six than some modern adult authors do today. Whatever the case, this humble venture spearheaded a lifetime of writing which began with fan fiction and evolved into more serious efforts – academic and otherwise – and which most recently includes this blog.
Aristotle spoke of how our basic personalities are formed at a young age. He foreshadowed the nature versus nurture debate regarding various aspects of our character: sexuality, addictions, mental health predispositions, etc. We accept that the answer to the nature versus nurture debate often appears to be that we are born this way and that our personality does not change. My own experiences of attending school or science fiction reunions – and finding my old classmates or Trek friends still pretty much the same people in middle age as they were when tender teenagers – is testimony to this fact.
And yet our early social conditioning – our nurture – is not immutable. My childhood upbringing included a strong religious component, from which I broke away in my twenties when intellectual and moral conflicts arose between religious dogma and real-life issues such as critical thinking, sexuality, world poverty, and the religious-based oppression of women, LGBT, and others. Secular utopian (and dystopian) science fiction provides much more relevant, grounded, thought-provoking and inspirational literature than does apocalyptic ancient Biblical mythology; real-life humanist activism helps to create a better world today than does deferring instead to an unproved religious afterlife.
At the time, my religious deconversion was like a cataclysmic nuclear explosion amongst toxic religious dictates that had accumulated in my life. The transition ended one life trajectory, and began another – one that was unexpected, unknown, and uncertain. Although painful at the time, in hindsight I now see 13 September 1987 as my day of liberation, encapsulated in a quote from science fiction TV series Space 1999:
“It’s better to live as your own man, than as a fool in someone else’s dream.”
(John Koenig, The Bringers of Wonder part 2, 1977).
Pain and trauma supply life experience that can lead to growth and personal development, and provide an opportunity to explore a vast cosmos of new ideas and fresh perspectives: To everything that might have been… To everything that was.
My life experience thereby suggests that there are aspects of free will which can be chosen and altered. I believe that we have a responsibility to choose betterment… every time.
Early exposure to science fiction and fan fiction instilled in me a sense of activist empowerment, and a strong optimism for the future despite what I see as humanity’s many flaws and weaknesses. That is my human journey, and I hope is it also your experience… and your daily choice within whatever aspects of free will you experience for yourself.
© 2021 Geoff Allshorn