There was an odd event during my family reunion that keeps circling about in my mind. to understand it you’ll need a little personal history of your host.

As a child I did not read fiction. I was much more obsessed with learning new thing than reading made-up stuff. this came to a crashing halt when as a school assignment I was struggling with a book report – the book was about Mars and I could not work out its plot or conflict – and my sister assigned me Robert A. Heinlein’s ‘The Star Beast.’ to read and report upon. This started a love affair with SF and reading fiction and the eventual drive to craft some of it myself.

Same sister made a comment during the reunion asking if she had done the right thing by starting me down that path. I think she might have been envisioning an alternate history where I continued with a tight focus on academic issues, gone on to college instead of the Navy, and ending up with a far different life.

It’s possible that might have happened, but I doubt it. Certainly by high school some teacher would have forced fiction upon me and there’s no reason to believe that my reaction would have been substantially different, but there a stronger case in my opinion that an academic path was not in my cards.

I did not have the discipline to succeed at college. Hell, I didn’t have the discipline to succeed in the USN where they have the legal power to jail you for screwing up. I do not doubt that I would have crashed and burned at college. I think that my life has worked out, on balance, for the better. Only time will tell what is left to come…