ne summer, many years ago, right around the time of the first Apollo missions, I went camping. Perhaps I should rephrase that: I was forcibly removed from my comfortable home and taken into the north woods of Wisconsin, where I was required to sit by a body of water called Echo Lake for a week at the height of mosquito season.
Like many parental activities of the day, such as spanking or smoking during pregnancy, this wasn't seen as cruelty, but rather a bizarre treat. A chance to escape from the routine horror of suburban predictability. A way to reconnect with our pioneering past.
I'll concede that a camping trip might possibly have done all of that.
But, boy, was I miserable on this one. It was five days of bugs, heat, rain and mud. (The weather was not conducive to happy camping.) My parents, my brother, my sister and even my Aunt Jean, all of us were crammed into one Hi-Lo trailer and a leaky tent at Echo Lake's south end. Even at this relatively early time of the year, the lake had begun to display a suspicious green scum right out of a sci-fi movie such as The Meteor Monster.
The campground, to use the term loosely, was also blessed with some sort of horse-related riding establishment. Which meant that the heavy, muggy, mosquito-laden air was enhanced by the constant smell of horse droppings.
What saved me was a book. Not just any book, but a sci-fi book. Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers, in fact.
Finding a haven in Heinlein
Starship Troopers was a fascinating book to be reading, if you were a 14-year-old boy living through a) the Apollo program and b) the Vietnam War. It told the story of the transformation of a boy growing up in a post-nuclear holocaust civilization where only veterans have the right to vote. The coolest thing about it was the powered suits each member of Heinlein's mobile infantry wore, which gave a single well-motivated, intelligent, human volunteer firepower equal to a whole horde of alien conscripts.
Those of you who saw the unfortunate 1998 Paul Verhoeven film based on Heinlein's novel may have missed this key point, probably because there were no powered suits. (It's not that Verhoeven's Starship Troopers is completely bad—as a movie, it works fine. It's as an adaptation of Heinlein's novel that it fails.)
So there I sat—more precisely, there I lay, stretched out in the back of our station wagon, the rain dribbling on the roof, while my parents and Aunt Jean cowered in the Hi-Lo, or dragged my younger brother and sister off to the nearby town of Spooner (or was it Minong?) in search of distraction. They could explore nature or quaint shops or various quasi-athletic experiences, while I fought ruthless alien invaders, and imagined life in a very different future.
Which is what made this a memorable sci-fi summer vacation.
It's even better now. No one drags me to lakes in northern Wisconsin. And the sci-fi options are a hundred times more interesting.
A filling feast of science fiction
Just this season I have watched Minority Report, Attack of the Clones and Spider-Man. Men in Black II is on its way as I write these words, as is Reign of Fire, and M. Night Shyamalan's Signs. Those are just the feature films. Even if I could have gotten myself to one of the few Echo Lake area theaters back in 1968, I wouldn't have found any sci-fi. In those dark days, you were lucky to find one decent sci-fi movie a season. (That year we had 2001.)
I've also got television now. In 1968, I could watch Star Trek (original brand) or, ugh, Land of the Giants. Now I can flip through the networks and catch what's left of X-Files or Dark Angel. I have the brand-new and promising Odyssey 5 on Showtime, as well as Jeremiah and this Leap Years thing I really have to catch up on. UPN offers Buffy and Enterprise.
I even have a whole channel of sci-fi, our very own SCI FI Channel (which used to proclaim that "summer" was the time for sci-fi, or something along those lines), and Farscape and Stargate SG-1, not to mention movies.
And, yes, I also have books, most recently Dennis Danvers' excellent and fated-to-be-overlooked novel, The Watch, from Eos. (Should I be ashamed to admit that it was only last summer that I finally got around to reading The Lord of the Rings?)
There's obviously something about summer that puts us in a sci-fi frame of mine. Being freed from routine, perhaps. Being away from home (even if we're stuck in a vacation spot we dislike). Being in the sunshine.
Which isn't to say that the only fantastic worlds we visit during our sci-fi summers are also free, distant and sunny. Independence Day was a fairly grim story, and it was massively successful.
In fact, many of these "escapist" visions are so downbeat or horrifying that they make us happy to be returning to the routine of school or job, cloudy days and rain.
Maybe that's the whole point.
Remembrance of sci-fi past
Postscript: 30 years later, my wife and children and I accepted an invitation from my mother-in-law to visit her and her husband at their cabin in northern Wisconsin. (When I say cabin, I mean a two-story, four-bedroom house.)
The cabin was on a lake like dozens of others in the area. One lazy afternoon my wife and I strolled a mile or two down that lake, past a small baitshop/convenience store. Something about the location of the building, or perhaps it was the play of light on the lake, or maybe just the constant drone of mosquitoes, suddenly triggered a memory. Like Marcel Proust and his cookie, to use a really high-falutin' and not remotely sci-fi-related comparison, I was launched years into the past.
"Hey," I said to my wife, "I spent the most miserable and wonderful week of my life on a lake just like this, 30 years ago." And I proceeded to tell her the details.
Not only that, when we returned to my parent's house, where, by some strange coincidence, my Aunt Jean happened to be visiting, I told the same story of my Proust-like trip through time.
"Where was this lake?" Aunt Jean asked.
I told her the location.
"That was where we camped in 1968."
Without knowing it, I had returned to Echo Lake!
Now that's a summery sci-fi story.
Michael Cassutt is currently writing scripts for 20th Television and for Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda, as well as a new novel for Forge Books. His sci-fi novelette, "More Adventures on Other Planets," has just been reprinted in The Year's Best Science Fiction: 19th Annual Collection (St. Martin's Press, 2002).
