Jean’s post about how her parents did not think fiction was appropriate reading material got me thinking about how I got sucked into the written word. As long as I can remember, I have this image of my dad reading something: the newspaper, Time magazine, the latest New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, or American Family Physician, or dime-store type paperback spy novels. If he wasn’t watching TV, he was reading, and sometimes he would do both—the book/magazine/or paper would get him through the interminable commercial breaks. It’s obvious that this impacted me greatly.

It’s hard to tell who is smarter between my dad and my mom. From an academic standpoint, my mom certainly did better, starting school a year early, becoming the salutatorian at her high school, and graduating summa cum laude from nursing school. On the other hand, I can’t help but wonder if my dad just wasn’t a classic underachiever. To this day, he takes pride in doing the minimum possible to get by.

This is kind of ironic, though, because my dad did manage to get through medical school, pass the boards in the U.S., and survive American residency training in the Bad Old Days™, where it was tacitly expected that you better start using amphetamines if you were struggling with making it through the 36+ hours of overnight call. (Now I know why Osler, one of the fathers of modern medicine, insisted that you had to stay at the patient’s bedside throughout the entire course of their illness. He was surely tweaking.) Still, he brags of barely passing every year of college and medical school. He has no use for professional accolades nor positions of leadership.

In terms of professional achievement, my mom is the same way, having eschewed higher-paying and easier administrative/management jobs for medium-paying jobs that consist of actual patient care.

Be that as it may, my dad reads a lot. My mom doesn’t. While a n of 2 is a poor sample size indeed, I can’t help but believe that this informs their political beliefs. My mom is a hard-core Republican. My dad, on the other hand, escapes conventional classification. He refuses to register with either major party, and has voted for both Democratic and Republican presidents. A lot of his beliefs probably fit better with libertarian, or indeed, anarchist philosophies, with a good helping of realpolitik that he picked up while in the Philippines during Marcos’ regime. He sees social democratic policies like social security and welfare as pragmatic sops from the moneyed elite to the common people, as cynical ploys to keep them dependent and to keep them from rebelling outright. I’m not sure if he’s actually read such philosophers, but I have a feeling that he would find Hobbes’ and Nietzsche’s thoughts familiar.

But in a further twist of irony, my dad doesn’t do much writing. He can tell a good story (when the Tim Burton movie “Big Fish” came out, I immediately thought of my dad), but he has never really succeeded in putting anything down on paper.

My dad’s influence on my career choice and philosophical trajectory is not surprising. But what is probably not readily apparent is how he affected my reading choices.

My dad is perhaps the prototypical nerd. Long before they acquired their patina of post-modern ironic coolness, my dad was reading comic books. Before it was even recognized as a genre, my dad was watching anime. Along with his spy novels, implicit in all of these things is the germ of escapism. He tells me that when he was young, instead of going to school, he’d sneak away to the movie theater and stay there all day long, even if he had to skip lunch all week to pay for admission.

So it was probably natural that I got sucked into science-fiction and fantasy. With regards to fantasy, I can readily trace this to 4th grade, when I first read The Hobbit, which eventually led to The Lord of the Rings, onwards through all of Tolkien’s legendarium. Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass figures in here somewhere, and I think the Chronicles of Narnia pre-dated my obsession with Middle Earth. But, of course, Disney’s reinterpretations of classic Western European fairy tales intersperses itself amongst all these. (The first one I consciously remember is “Robin Hood”, perhaps subconsciously forming my class-consciousness and my disdain of the elites.)

With science fiction, it’s a little more murky. It may be that the first science-fiction novel I ever read was A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’engle. Most of my science-fiction exposure started off in film. Obviously, there was the entire “Star Wars” Trilogy, but there was also the “Superman” franchise. And then there were even more obscure movies, like “The Last Starfighter”, “The Explorers”, “Flight of the Navigator”, “D.A.R.Y.L.” But there were three movies that etched themselves into my consciousness at an atavistic level. “Dune”, with the quasi-Biblical desert world of Arrakis and its massive sandworms, “2010”, which got me believing that we were making regular trips to Jupiter and Saturn, and the unsung, under-appreciated Disney movie, “TRON”, which pre-figured “The Matrix” by nearly two decades.

I also find it ironic that I read almost all of these books in Catholic school, and watched many of these movies in Catholic school as well.

For some reason, I’ve never really gotten into contemporary literature. The books that I have read that aren’t obvious science-fiction or fantasy still have a lot of science-fictional and/or fantastic elements to them. (The ones that comes to mind easiest are Chuck Palahniuk’s novels.) And if they aren’t science-fiction or fantasy, then they’re classics. I didn’t read any Dostoevsky until I was pretty much graduated from college. I found the Beowulf poet, Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton more compelling than anything written in the last decade.

But I’ve been working on utilizing the form of science-fiction and fantasy as an avenue, not of escape, but of engagement. Sometimes the only way to come to grips with reality is to abandon all assumptions, and this is where science-fiction and fantasy succeeds the most in comparison to other genres.