Through Darkest Adolescence with Lois McMaster Bujold or Thank You, But I Already Have a Life

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Creator:	Lillian Stewart Carl
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Through Darkest Adolescence with Lois McMaster Bujold or Thank You, But I Already Have a Life is an essay by Lillian Stewart Carl.

The focus is her friendship with Lois McMaster Bujold, their writing and personal journeys, science fiction fandom, and their fanworks.

Excerpts

It was simple clerical whim that assigned Lois and me to section 7-2 at Hastings Junior High School in Upper Arlington, Ohio—a suburb of Columbus.

Perhaps we were attracted to each other because we had both already achieved our adult heights—the breathtaking altitudes of 5'5" and 5'7" respectively—and compared to the other seventh graders felt as though we were dragging our knuckles on the linoleum floors.

At first I was in awe of Lois. She had attained little-girl apotheosis: she owned a pony. At the riding school just down the road from her home she acquired the equine knowledge that would lead in time to Fat Ninny and the other trusty steeds of Vorkosigan Surleau. The first award I saw Lois win was a blue ribbon and silver bowl in a riding competition. When the judge called her number, she sat disbelieving for a long moment, then reached around to pull the number off the back other shirt and make sure it was really hers.

The most important things we had in common, though, were a love of reading, vivid imaginations, and the compulsion to write. While I'd been reading history and mythology for years, tastes that I passed on to Lois, I'd never before encountered the strange new worlds of Lois's favorite, science fiction.

Fans, to us, were the girls who read movie magazines and were gaga over Doctor Kildare and Little Joe Cartwright.

Lois read, and passed on to me, Poul Anderson, A.E. Van Vogt, Zenna Henderson, James Schmitz, Cordwainer Smith, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein (we thought Stranger in a Strange Land was gigglingly racy). Conan Doyle and C.S. Forester we discovered together. And Tolkien's Lord of the Rings remains to this day one of our all time favorite books.

We went to movies, from Lilies of the Field to Battle of the Bulge, from Wild in the Streets (anyone remember that?) to Goldfinger to Lawrence of Arabia—the latter implanting the image of the brooding hero permanently in our literary vocabularies.

We wrote, bits and pieces of poetry, fractions of stories, assuring ourselves that this was “practice” for “later on”—although just what "later on" was going to be, we were never able to articulate.

Lois did contribute to the school literary magazine, narrative poems that would have done Ogden Nash proud. One included the line “curses vitriolic”, which ended up in the magazine as “curses nitriolic” because the typist couldn't read the copy and didn't know what vitriol was anyway.

I wish I could remember what Lois rhymed with “curses vitriolic.”

I watched Star Trek. I fell for it too. Spock made intelligence classy. He was so cool, so—unattainable. Unlike Kirk, who was incessantly Available. And there were women on the Enterprise. They wore miniskirts and said, “Hailing frequencies open,” and “Captain, I'm scared”, but they were female nonetheless.

Every Thursday evening during our senior year found us sitting in front of Lois's television (she had the color set) watching Star Trek. We suborned other friends into joining us. We rigged up Lois's father's reel-to-reel tape recorder and recorded each episode — audio only, the concept of the VCR being science fiction itself.

The tape would pick up the sound of the telephone ringing in the background, chairs scooting, popcorn crunching. And during the previews to the episode This Side of Paradise, it recorded half-a-dozen female squeals as Spock actually (be still, my teenage hormones) smiled!

For a time our writing explored the Star Trek universe. Then, finding ourselves choked by working in someone else's cosmos, we moved above and beyond and into a multi-generational future history that absorbed our attention for several years. Among other things, we allied our version of the Klingons with the Federation long before Next Generation did.

Our graduation from high school took place on a Thursday night, forcing us to miss the episode Shore Leave. Strangely, our families refused to attend the ceremonies without us. The younger sister of a friend was deputized to do the taping and fill in the video portion with gestures and expressions.

The next fall I went away to college, in a town that had only two television stations, neither of which showed Star Trek. Lots transcribed the episode Amok Time, including the stage directions (“bowl of soup flies across passageway”) and sent it to me. My roommate sniffed and said I was psychologically abnormal. But another friend gave me a poster of Spock.

Meanwhile, back in Columbus, Lois had struck gold in the SF section of a bookstore: a rack of flyers advertising Central Ohio Science Fiction Societya science fiction fan club.

We were no longer alone.

Some members of the group, heavily into intellectual pursuits such as Also Sprach Zarathustra, were dubious about our enthusiasm for Star Trek. Others took it in stride. Until the day that Lois and I, like Garland and Rooney declaring, “Let's put on a show!” announced that we were going to try our hands at one of those things called a “fanzine”. One dedicated solely to Star Trek.

The others members of COSFS informed us gently that there was no such thing as an all-fiction ‘zine. Neither was there any such thing as a media-dedicated ‘zine. So what? we replied with the zeal of the innocent. We're going to do it anyway!

Lois and I ended up writing almost the entire ‘zine ourselves. Embarrassed, we made up pseudonyms for a few pieces—including stanzas lifted from Shakespeare's “Venus and Adonis” which could be applied to Spock. (“Art thou obdurate, flinty, hard as steel, Nay more than flint, for stone at rain relenteth...”) Illustrations came mostly from Janie Bowers, the aforementioned younger sister, and from Ron Miller, now a pro artist. Intent on doing it up right, we paid to have all the illos electronically etched. More shaking of heads among the COSFS members.

We typed every word ourselves, on long sheets of waxy purplish paper, and, since neither of us were skilled typists, became intimately acquainted with correction fluid, or “corflu.”

Bribed by chocolate chip cookies, COSFS member John Ayotte agreed to run off our ‘zines on his basement mimeograph machine. Janie's cartoon cover had too many dark areas, and stuck inkily to the whirling drum, but John, bless him, donated his own thicker paper for the covers. And so StarDate was born.

There we were, seeing our words in black and white type for the first time. Daring to air our psyches before the world. We were giddy, and not only from the fumes of the corflu.

Lois and I gathered up the precious piles of StarDate and headed down to Cincinnati for Midwestcon, our first convention, squabbling all the way over how much to charge for our baby. Fifty cents? A dollar?

I don't remember whether it was at Midwestcon or later that we discovered another Trek ‘zine, the delightful Spockanalia. Our impulse hadn't been an aberration after all — Trek ‘zines were appearing all over the country. Today the media ‘zine is a fundamental of fandom.

Within months of StarDate’s appearance my family moved away from Ohio. Our ‘zine was doomed to be a one-shot; the name was later picked up by someone else. Lois went to her first Worldcon, in California, without me. But she sent me a present, a chalk-on-velour portrait of Engineer Scott. The package arrived on my doorstep borne by a very amused postman—all over the wrapping paper Lois had written exhortations to Handle with Care. “Oh yes,” my mother told him with a patient sigh, “that's from my daughter's little friend.”

We survived adolescence, only to confront adulthood. But we still had science fiction. And we still wrote.

One evening, as my infant son—who was born on a Friday the thirteenth—crawled over our feet, Lois told me of a story she'd been toying with: a Klingon officer and a red-headed Federation scientist (the latest in a long line of red-headed heroines) are stranded together on a planet resembling the African plains which Lois had recently toured...

Fan Comments

I love the ending of that story. Though I have to say that after all my years in Trek fandom, it never fails to amuse me that the same women who go nuts over Spock's cool, unattainable reserve love most the episodes where he loses it. They say they love him because he's untouchable, but what they actually love is the idea that they might be the one to melt him into sticky cotton candy. They diss Kirk (in perpetuity, ad nauseum), but really, they want to be Kirk and just haven't figured that out. ;)