Here’s the first part (of three) in the story of my rise to geekdom.
Early Days – Genesis of a Geek
I’m a geek. I’ve always been a geek, I’ve been one all my life, and simply can’t conceive of being any other way. I’m also extremely militant in my geekness, and not one of those shy, retiring types who tries to hide it out of view, for fear of ridicule. I’ve always been proud of my geek status. I don’t care who knows it or who doesn’t like it. They can all take a great running leap off the top of a high building, as far as I’m concerned.
The foundations of my future geekhood were laid down at a very early age, when I started to read my first “proper” books (books with lots of words, rather than mere “picture books”). These early books were full of dinosaurs, spaceships and stories of other worlds, all of which captivated my fertile young imagination. I think it all really started when my uncle (Liam MacGabhann, or Liam McGowan, for all you non Gaelic-speaking anglo plebs out there) started buying me those old “How And Why Wonder Books” from the local APCK Bookshop (never had a clue what APCK stood for) when I was about three or four years old. Planets and Interplanetary Travel, Dinosaurs, Robots and Electronic Brains, Prehistoric Mammals, Stars, the list goes on. I still have a few of these old books in storage, fading, falling apart at the spines, ancient relics of my earliest childhood.
So all the influences and obsessions of a future geek had already been laid down right from the start. But why did I choose that path, rather than follow the more mundane hobbies that the vast majority of other kids my age indulged in?
My childhood was not a happy one. To say that I did not have a proper childhood would be an accurate assessment. My family was poor, very poor, and we never had much in the line of material goods. For much of the time it was a struggle for our parents to even feed and clothe us. We also lived on a council estate in Northern Ireland during that infamous period in Irish history known as “The Troubles”, which overshadowed my entire earlier life, beginning when I was only eight years old, and lasting right up into my thirties. For everyone of my generation who lived through it, it was a dark time, full of tensions, fear, and unhappiness.
Things got even worse when I was eleven years old, when my parents separated, leaving my father to raise five kids on his own. He was forced to leave his job, and our descent into poverty became even more severe. To top it all off, my father’s health began to decline sharply after my mother left, and within a few short years he was a wheelchair-bound invalid. As the “oldest”, I was shoehorned into the role of “surrogate mother” from this very tender age, taking over the extremely heavy responsibilities of not only looking after my father, but also the other four kids, one of whom was also very severely disabled himself.
To be blunt, I was a very unhappy young boy, who sought refuge in a world of make-believe. Any kind of an escape from this dreary and depressing reality was a welcome one, and I immersed myself in a world of comics, watching sci-fi on television and in films, reading great SF literature, drawing and writing. To refer to these interests as mere “hobbies” would be a complete understatement. They were obsessions, a vital lifeline for me, and I depended on them utterly to keep me sane, when everything around me was so gloomy and depressing. Since childhood, and throughout my entire life, these “obsessions” have been entrenched as fundamental pillars of my personality and way of thinking, and I simply cannot imagine my life without them.
I took every chance I could to escape from “real life” into the realms of my incredibly active imagination. From a very early age, I showed a very strong preference for the fantastic rather than the mundane, for wild adventures into space and through time, dinosaurs, aliens, indeed anything “out of this world”. I started reading comics at about four or five years old, and was already developing a strong preference for the more SF-oriented strips over the less fantasy-oriented stories. Around the same time, I started paying attention to sci-fi and fantasy films and television programs on TV. Doctor Who, on British television started having its first influence on me about 1966-67, when I was about six years old, and at about roughly the same time my life was changed forever when I saw the classic George Pal movie adaption of The Time Machine on Irish television (RTE). I became totally obsessed with the concept of time travel, which remains my favourite SF theme even now. At the young age of six or seven, I was already a confirmed SF nut, at least as far as comics, films and television were concerned.
As a direct result of this obsession with The Time Machine movie and Doctor Who, I was also to start reading SF. About a year or two after I’d seen the movie, I found Wells’s The Time Machine in a local library, and I just had to read it. I was hooked, despite the drastic differences between the novel and the movie, and moved from there on to reading anything else I could find by Wells, then on to Verne, Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein and the greater world of SF authors at large. I’ve never looked back, and remain a hardcore SF literature fan to this day.
My father really hated all of this silly “sci-fi nonsense”, but tolerated it when I was very young. But he hoped desperately that I’d “grow out of it” as I got older. Some chance! Here I am, more than forty years later, and still a hardcore SF fan. Poor Dad! He must be turning in his grave!
To Be Continued…
