I’ve only ever had one talent, only one thing I was really good at doing, and everything else has come from that. That talent is reading. Knowing how to read. Reading easily and well. Enjoying reading. That’s the foundation for everything else I’ve managed to accomplish in my life.

I can thank my mother for the ability to read, for she taught me how to read when I was very young, long before I entered kindergarten. She was a lifelong insomniac, a tendency that I share, and throughout the long nights when my father wasn’t around, which was the majority of the time, we’d sit up together for hours, throughout the night until the sun started to peek in through the windows, and we’d share crackers and pickles together and she would read aloud to me, read aloud to me for hours, teaching me how to sound out the words. The books that she’d read to me from most often–and I never saw how peculiar this was until much later–were collections of Walt Kelly’s Pogo comic strips. Most of the political satire in those Pogo strips went over my head, of course, and went over my mother’s head as well, truth be told, as she was not a highly educated woman, but the humor came through, and the relish that Kelly took in playing with words. Since my mother spoke with an extremely broad working-class New England accent, listening to her faithfully trying to reproduce the comic Deep South dialect in which the Pogo books are written must have been enough to make a cat laugh, although, of course, my own untrained ear couldn’t hear it at the time. If any time-travelers are headed back that way, I’d dearly love a tape.

I do believe that if my mother hadn’t taught me to read, and to love reading, at such an early age, that none of you would ever have heard of me.

I even remember the very first word that I ever read all by myself, a moment that, silly as it is, was one of the major epiphanies of my life. If you held a gun to my head, I couldn’t tell you what I had been doing five minutes before that epiphany, or five minutes later, but the minute or two of the epiphany itself, I remember in every vivid detail, as if it had happened only a second ago, as if it’s still happening somewhere, in some parallel dimension. I was sitting by myself in the living room of our third-floor apartment, sitting on the floor next to the bay window, looking through the comic strips in the Sunday paper, just looking at the brightly colored pictures, because as yet I couldn’t read. I can remember the leaves of the trees shaking outside the window, and the way that sunlight was slanting in through the window, and the way that dust motes were hanging suspended in the sunlight. And I remember the way the dialogue balloons looked that rose above the mouths of the characters, filled with incomprehensible scribbles, alien hieroglyphics. And then, looking closer, at a strip that, in retrospect, I realize must have been Blondie & Dagwood, I suddenly realized that two of the scribbles coming out of Blondie’s mouth were an "N" and an "O," and this must have come together in the back of my head with some lesson that my mother had been teaching me, because it suddenly struck me that "N" and "O" together made up the word "no," and that Blondie was saying "No." That the symbols in the balloons were not just meaningless scribbles, that they were conveying a message to me, a message that I could read and understand. This revelation hit me with blinding force, like a bolt of lightning. I doubt that Saint Paul’s revelation on the road to Damascus could have been any more intense or overwhelming. I threw the newspaper up in the air and tore madly around the room, capering like a lunatic, ecstatically shouting "n-o means NO! N-o means NO!" And then I froze, for all at once it hit me, again with overwhelming force, that all the other such scribbles in the world, scribbles and hieroglyphics everywhere, on bottles, on labels, on street-signs, in the newspapers, on TV, on the front of the stove and the refrigerator, scribbles everywhere that I had been ignoring up until now, looking at without really seeing them or paying any real attention to them, all around me, all of them had hidden meanings, all of them were trying to tell me something, all of them had something to say to me, secret wisdom to convey, if only I could learn to read them. And I was struck with an overwhelming desire, flooding in on me, to understand them all, every single one of them.

To such an extent that, to this very day, if you put a ketchup bottle down in front of me, I have no choice but to read the label, reflexively, compulsively, unstoppably. I can’t not read it. Who knows what secret wisdom that ketchup bottle label could be trying to convey to me, after all?

I was a lonely child who led an isolated existence, with few, if any friends, or even other children around, most of my time spent either with just my mother for company or all by myself (in retrospect, I seem to have spent centuries, if not whole geologic eras, wandering around my small New England town all by myself, from when I was very little–something my doting but absentminded mother allowed that would never be allowed today). And so reading remained very important to me, a central part of my life, and as soon as I could read by myself, which was at a very young age (my mother claimed that I could read independently by the time I was two years old–she was an unreliable witness in many ways, so who knows if this is true, but it was at least very early on, certainly years before I entered the school system), I devoured any book (indeed, any piece of paper with writing on it) that I could get my hands on. In many ways, books and stories were my only real friends, something that remained true throughout large stretches of my entire life. I remember one bitterly cold winter night when I was a teenage soldier in Germany, away from home for the first time, freshly assigned overseas, knowing nobody except fellow soldiers I’d only been introduced to a day before, as lonely and depressed and forlorn as I’d ever been in my life, wandering into the tiny base library and seeing on the shelves there familiar books that I’d once taken out of the library at home, and feeling a sudden surge of warmth and encouragement as I touched the familiar cracked, threadbare spines of the books and looked at their faded covers. It was all right. I could get through this. I wasn’t alone here after all. I had friends.

Most of those friends, from a fairly early age, had been science fiction. I felt drawn to the genre immediately, an attraction that strengthened as the years went by and my reading sophistication increased. Thinking about it in retrospect, and from talking to other people about their own early reading habits, I think I’ve come to see why.

An early favorite book of mine was Kipling’s The Jungle Book, and I moved from there into reading other young adult series about animals, including Jim Kjelgaard’s series about Irish Setters, Walter Farley’s two series of horse books, and Albert Payston Terhune’s long and (in hindsight) intolerably mawkish series about heroic collie dogs. At the same time, I was reading the "boy’s adventure" series of the day, like Rick Brant’s Scientific Adventures, Tom Swift, Jr., and the Hardy Boys, although even at the time, I thought those were rather lame (didn’t stop me from reading them, though!). At some point, I gradually moved out of reading these other things into reading science fiction. I think that the first SF books I read that I can really remember well, ones that made an impression on me deeper than did those I might have run across before that, were the so-called "juvenile" novels of Andre Norton, which I ran into in the school library. I quickly went from there to reading the Heinlein juveniles, though, which made an even stronger impression on me–it was probably the Heinlein juveniles that first set the hook in, which seemed to satisfy whatever hunger I was trying to assuage with these other books better than they did.

A little bit after that, once I’d been reading the Heinlein juveniles for awhile, I discovered science fiction magazines, and that’s when I really got hooked. My first magazine was Fantastic, which at that point was being edited by Cele Goldsmith. She’d just coaxed Fritz Leiber back out of semi-retirement, and the magazine was running all these great Gray Mouser stories by him, and that instantly hooked me. At about the same time, I ran into anthologies such as Unknown, by Don Benson, and Sword & Sorcery by L. Sprague de Camp, which also had similar stuff in them, including other Gray Mouser stories, Howard’s Conan stories, Manly Wade Wellman’s Silver John stories. Benson, as the editor of Pyramid, was also bringing back classic fantasy novels, such as De Camp and Pratt’s The Incomplete Enchanter. So in a way, except for Heinlein and Norton, I was actually a fantasy fan before I was an SF fan.

Later, after a brief infatuation with Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. Rider Haggard, and A. Merritt, stories by writers like Roger Zelazny, Poul Anderson and Jack Vance, many of them also in Fantastic and her sister magazine, Amazing, along with Heinlein, of course, started to shift me away from sword & sorcery to SF, and I started reading everything I could find.

Hal Clement’s Cycle of Fire and Mission of Gravity were early favorites of mine, as were Poul Anderson’s "Dominic Flandry" and "Time Patrol" stories, Keith Laumer’s Worlds of the Imperium and A Plague of Demons, De Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall and The Hand of Zei, Jack Vance’s The Star King and The Blue World, Brian Aldiss’s The Long Afternoon of Earth, Edgar Pangborn’s Davy. I remember being impressed early on by Alfred Bester, particularly The Stars My Destination, still one of the great SF novels. A little later, when I was making my first halting attempts to write my own stuff, I encountered the short fiction of Cordwainer Smith, and had my blinkered little mind blown completely out of the back of my skull. I was also an early Samuel R. Delany fan, and read all his novels before anyone else had heard of him or was paying any attention to him. The same thing with Ursula K. Le Guin.

I think I can see a common thread tying all of this stuff together.

I was a working-class kid in a small working-class New England mill town, and my father worked in a chemical factory in the even bleaker and more Dickensian factory town next door. We weren’t as poor as people in hardcore urban slums, I suppose, but we were poor enough for all practical purposes. And this was the fifties, the grayest, bleakest, most blinkered and culturally repressive period in the entire second half of the twentieth century, especially in small-town America.

In retrospect, I think that what I was looking for most was the view from someone else’s eyes (or some thing else’s eyes), someone who was leading a totally different kind of life than the rather gray, miserable, and downtrodden existence I was actually leading myself, anywhere but where I actually was. To get inside someone else’s skin. The yearning for color and exoticism to contrast with the gray world I actually lived in was a big factor here–and in fact, to this day, I still respond well to SF or fantasy that has lots of "local color" and exoticism in it. In some ways, I respond to the same sort of thing in historical fiction that I do in SF, which is probably why it’s always been easy to sell me something that has lots of strong historical details of exotic cultures in it or that takes place in some other time period.

Yes, we’re talking about the much sneered at Sense of Wonder here–still, to my mind, the major reason to read science fiction or fantasy in the first place. To be taken somewhere else, to briefly become someone else, and, for the span of time it takes you to turn the pages, to live a life that you otherwise could never have known. As editor of Asimov’s, I’ve always tried to keep firmly in mind the fact that I have the same job as P.T. Barnum: it’s my job to show people miracles and wonders, for money. No miracles, no wonders–no customers, either. I think that this core fact is something that we forget to our peril.

And so, step by step, without really intending to early on, I ended up devoting my life to a career in science fiction.

And thus changed my life forever. A life that had been planned out for me by everybody around me, and that without the liberating force of science fiction, without the eye-opening sense of different perspectives and possibilities it bestowed, would have been different in every respect, and probably much inferior in most of them as well. Before I even graduated from high school, my father had already arranged for me to get a job at the factory in which he worked, a job that he remained disappointed I didn’t take until the day he died, my accomplishments in the world of fiction meaning less than nothing to him. Without science fiction to dissatisfy me with the world in which I lived, to make me long for something different and better, and to make me believe that it was possible to reach a different kind of life, that a different kind of life even existed, the chances are very good that I would have spent the rest of my life in that small New England town, as almost everyone else I grew up with did, working in the factory or in some other blue collar job. Science fiction was my way out of that small town, as it has been the way out for thousands of other people across the span of the last century, from Jack Williamson to Howard Waldrop, and it was the only way out, other than picking up a gun and turning to a life of crime, or finding in myself an unlikely talent for becoming a rock and roll star. As a working-class boy of the time, the ironclad barriers of class were closed against my finding my way into any other area of art or literature, with all of my teachers, and my advisors, and even the admissions officers at the colleges themselves discouraging me from applying for college, telling me that "college isn’t for you" or "your sort don’t go to college." The bastions of High Art seemed similarly out of reach; "serious music," painting, sculpting, opera, the ballet, poetry, literature–those things were for rich people, not for kids from my side of the tracks. But because science fiction was a proletarian art, created by ordinary people with no particular training or certification, because it was an art form that the literary/artistic establishment didn’t care about, and so didn’t rigorously police, it offered a chink in the defenses of an otherwise seemingly impregnable citadel–a crack that I squeezed myself through to escape the dreary life that everyone assumed I’d have no choice but to lead. Without science fiction, you would never have heard of me, and somebody else would have their name listed as editor on the masthead of this magazine.

There’s been a lot of talk in the last couple of years about how the genre is on its last legs, but, to modify the words of Mark Twain, I think that the Death of Science Fiction has been greatly exaggerated. In some ways, the science fiction genre has never been in better shape, either commercially or artistically.

But perhaps most importantly, science fiction or something resembling it and descended from it is not going to die because it will always be needed. There’ll always be a need for wonder, there’ll always be people who long for a different kind of life, for the view from other sorts of eyes, for a chance to see what’s over the hill, or off in another world.

So, then, all those years ago, against all the odds, I took the thinnest of all possible thin chances, and devoted myself to a life in science fiction. And because of that decision, not only have I been able to have a life in the arts and a life of the mind of a sort that would have almost certainly been otherwise impossible for someone of my social class and inferior education any other way, but I actually got to meet and associate with some of the people whose accomplishments I admired the most, people such as Fritz Leiber and Roger Zelazny and Isaac Asimov and John Brunner and Clifford Simak and Alfred Bester and Damon Knight and Robert Silverberg. And in addition to the paper friends of books, I got to make some lifelong flesh-and-blood friends whom I otherwise would certainly never have gotten the chance to meet, people such as Susan Casper, and Jack Dann, and George R.R. Martin, and Pat Cadigan, and Joe and Jay Haldeman, and Michael Swanwick, and Eileen Gunn, and Howard Waldrop, and dozens of others.

I’ve probably had to read more bad science fiction than anyone else in the world; but, on the other hand, I’ve probably been privileged to read more good science fiction than anyone else in the world.

People sometimes ask me if I regret having wasted my life working in science fiction, and not doing something of real importance and significance instead, but, on the whole, it seems to me that it’s not really been such a bad bargain at all. Certainly I could have done much worse–and the odds are good that I probably would have done much worse, taking any other path.

So, no–I don’t regret it. Other people may be richer than science fiction people, or more important, or more famous, or more beautiful, or more glamorous, or more successful.

But we have the best dreams.