Shelf-Life #1: Race Against Time
(As I recently announced, this is the first in a new blog series I am trying out called “Shelf-Life.” Each episode centers on a book on my shelf. See the original post for more details. And enjoy!)
Several years ago, needing to free up shelf space, I went through a very rare (for me) purge of books. I think of my books as being part of one big collection that reflects my interests over the course of my life. I tend to make my books my own, scribbling in the margins, jotting notes on the endpapers, and this makes me less inclined to give books away after I’ve read them. They become a valuable reference for me. But I was desperate and looking through what was then about a thousand books, I settled on about a hundred or so paperbacks, the vast majority of which were written by Piers Anthony. By the time I’d finished, I’d donated all but 9 of my Piers Anthony books. The ones I’d kept were the ones that made the biggest impacts on me: hardcover editions of the Incarnations of Immortality books, his 3-part novel Tarot, a signed copy of Kai!, and a TOR paperback edition of Race Against Time.
It was my junior high school friend, Noah, who first turned me onto Piers Anthony. He would describe scenes from Xanth novels and Apprentice Adept novels. Eventually, he loaned me copies of some of the books and I began to read through them voraciously. I especially enjoyed the Author’s Notes in Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality and Bio of a Space Tyrant books. These notes were the first things I’d ever read about what life as a writer was really like.
With many authors, it is clear what book introduced me to their work. With Isaac Asimov, for instance, it was The Caves of Steel back in the early 1980s, and then after a long gap, his memoir, I. Asimov in 1994. With Robert Heinlein it was Double Star. I remember reading a beat-up paperback copy of that book in virtually a single sitting, except that I wasn’t sitting, I was walking around the neighborhood where I lived in Studio City, California, oblivious to everything around me—including the traffic. With Piers Anthony, I can’t remember what the first book I read was after my friend Noah introduced me to him. Was it A Spell for Chameleon? Was it Split Infinity? I simply couldn’t remember.
And then one day in 1989 or 1990, while browsing books on break from my job at a stationery store in the Northridge Fashion Center, I saw a paperback copy of a book called Race Against Time by Piers Anthony, and the answer to the first book I’d ever read by Anthony suddenly fell into place.
I have a friend—a doctor—who once told me that, despite being a doctor and making good money, he never felt particularly wealthy until he bought a sailboat. Everyone has a different superficial measure of success. I’m not buying a sailboat anytime soon, but for me, seeing a book and being able to buy it without thinking much about the price is my own superficial measure of success. I say this because I can remember a time when I would pine over books I saw in a bookstore, or advertised in a magazine, wishing I could afford a copy. I was a regular at my local library and sometimes the books I pined for were available for me to check out, which did allow me to read them—and has ever since made me indebted to the public library system. But what I really wanted to do was keep the books, and that was something I couldn’t do.
As a young teenager, my local library was the Granada Hills branch of the Los Angeles Public Library. It was about a mile from my house, and nestled right next to Petit Park, which had a decent playground. On summer mornings, I’d walk the mile to the library in the dry Los Angeles heat with a book under each arm, reading a third book, and just barely keeping an eye on traffic at the major intersections I had to cross. Opening the doors to the library let out a blast of cold air that was a pleasure after the hot walk. I’d return my books and then step into what seems, in my imagination, to be a large space filled with books. Facing that space from the front desk, there were lots of shelves on the right side, with the 500s (science books, where I spent a lot of time) about a third of the way down the building. On the left side was more open space, some tables, carrels, and books racks and along the wall. One day, while browsing one of those book racks, I came across Race Against Time. I don’t know what about it caught my attention, but quite possibly, it was the text on the back cover:
John Smith is just a typical teenager growing up in a typical American town in 1960… Or is he?
He has a dog—that can climb trees and understand very complex commands.
He has parents—who watch him constantly, taking notes when they think he’s not looking.
He has a girlfriend—a girl he’s never met, whom he has been told he must marry.
John knows that something is wrong, but until he crosses the boundary fence late one night, he doesn’t realize just how much. For wherever, whenever he lives, it is definitely notAmerica, circa 1960!
That hooked me. I checked out the book and apart from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, it was the only book at that point in my life that I tore through in a single sitting.
I haven’t read the book in the 40 years since that first reading, but it has always had a special place in my heart. My memory of the plot is vague, and while the book held me spellbound, I’m not convinced it was a particularly remarkable story. It has popped up in my memory several times over the years. When I read Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint in 1997, I was reminded of Anthony’s Race Against Time. (Time Out of Joint was published in 1959 while Race Against Time was published in 1973, so perhaps the former influenced the latter.) When I saw the film, The Truman Show in 1998, I was immediately reminded of both books.
It was probably 1985 or so when I discovered Race Against Time in the library. Back then, I paid little attention to the name of the author on the book. Indeed, walking home from the library that day, I was almost certainly reading while I walked, as oblivious to the author’s name as I was my surroundings. By the time I re-discovered the book five years later, I’d read a dozen or more Piers Anthony books and enjoyed them. It was something of a wonder to realize that I’d encountered his work once before in Race Against Time.
Piers Anthony was the first author I started to “collect.” On rare occasions in high school and college when I had funds to buy books, they were almost exclusively Piers Anthony books. In his Author’s Notes, Anthony would sometimes talk about the fan mail he received. It never occurred to me, until then, that one might write to an author nor that the author would take the time to reply. Sometime in my junior year in college, I wrote to Anthony, and some weeks later, received a gracious reply. In his reply, he wrote, “Dear Miss Rubin, (I am assuming by your name you are female.)” It was after receiving this letter that I began using my middle name, Todd, on my bylines and signatures.
The correspondence continued for a year or so, reaching its peak of retroactive embarrassment when I broke a cardinal rule of writing, and sent Piers Anthony a story I’d written for his comment. I look back on that bravado with absolute horror, but to his credit, Anthony sent me a lengthy critique of the story, and I am grateful for his patience with me.
Much of the Piers Anthony I’ve read, including Race Against Time, took place before I tracked what I read. Over the years, I read all his Incarnations of Immortality series, his Bio of a Space Tyrant series, independent books like Macroscope, his Cluster Series, his Mode series, as well as his historical books like Tatham Mound and his autobiography, Bio of an Ogre. I also read (twice) the first 10 or 11 books of his most famous series, Xanth. (When I last checked, Xanth was up to 40+ books.) At my peak, I had amassed around one hundred Piers Anthony books, second only to Isaac Asimov in my collection. It was most of those 100 Piers Anthony books that I purged to make space on my shelves for other books.
Race Against Time played a pivotal role in my reading history. For one thing, once I “rediscovered” the book in 1990 or so, I made it a point to be aware of the name of the author whose book I was reading. Moreover, as a newspaper reader, I rarely paid attention to the bylines of the articles I read, but around that time, I started to look more closely at those bylines, more readily identifying columnists like Al Martinez of the Los Angeles Times when before I never really paid attention to that.
Perhaps even more important, Race Against Time changed the way I read. Prior to Race Against Time, I started many books, only to give up on them partway through. With Race Against Time, I was drawn in, and while there were parts that I recall seemed slow at times, I made the effort to finish it and was glad that I did. After Race Against Time, I finished books more often than I gave up on them. Today, with the experience of thousands of books under my belt, I am more discerning about my selection and the likelihood of me finishing a book that I start is very high. Something about the way the story drew me in stuck with me, and I think some of that has come through in my own stories that I’ve written over the years.
Looking back, it seems crazy that a random encounter with a book on a book rack on a warm summer morning in Los Angeles would have such an impact on me. That, of course, is the beauty of books and of reading in a nutshell.
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