You Are Now Entering Nerddom

I have to confess this before it gets any worse. I am NOT a sci-fi geek, sure I watched Star Wars as a kid but not Star Trek, and I could probably count the science fiction books I've read on one hand, and even those fall under the classic or literary fiction category (e.g. 1984, Brave New World). Ok, sure, I love the Transformers and Labyrinth and JJ Abrams shows and all of that, but - ok fine I'll just spit it out. It hit me today that I am simultaneously reading two books in which Slans are discussed. Let me explain. I've never heard of a Slan before, because, as I said and as I swear is true, I am not a sci-fi geek. I've never read A.E. van Vogt's novel Slan. Yet on my commute this morning, I began the chapter entitled "Telepathy" in the really awesome and NOT nerdy book by Michio Kaku called Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration Into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel.

I probably need to explain more: this book is seriously cool. OK, yes, I think teleportation and robots are really awesome subjects and yes, I chose, of my own free will, to read this book. But dude - you can't even get through one relatively mundane sentence in the Preface without being blown away. Case in point: "While interstellar travel for our civilization is clearly impossible, it may be possible for a civilization centuries to thousands or millions of years ahead of ours." That's a relatively mundane sentence compared to, say, this: "In high school...I built a 2.3-million-electron-volt betatron particle accelerator, which consumed 6 kilowatts of power (the entire output of my house) and generated a magnetic field of 20,000 times the Earth's magnetic field. The goal was to generate a beam of gamma rays powerful enough to create antimatter." See?? This shit is fuckin' cool.

So back to what I was saying, this morning I get to the chapter on Telepathy, which begins by Kaku describing Vogt's novel Slan, in which the protagonist, a "slan," is one of a dying race of superintelligent telepaths. In keeping with my insistence that I'm not a total nerd, Kaku goes on to discuss why telepathy isn't scientifically possible now and how real-life people, like the CIA in the 70s, have tried to use telepathy and what a truly telepathic person might be capable of, if telepathy truly existed, which it doesn't. This is cool! ...Right?

OK. Fine. I know, you're right. It's borderline nerdy. But then what worries me is that on my ride HOME from work, IN THE SAME DAY, I read yet another passage about Slans, IN A DIFFERENT BOOK. Granted, this one has nothing to do with teleportation or robots and WON THE PULITZER PRIZE IN FICTION so I thought, hoped, that I would save myself from becoming too nerdy if I read it simultaneously along with Kaku's book. But shit. In Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (which I started reading today after receiving it from a thankful editor at Viking/Penguin who offered to send me a book after I expedited a request for him last week; naturally I said yes and asked for this, which I've been dying to read), the protagonist is Oscar, "a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd, a New Jersey romantic who dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love." Sounds good, right? Well, it is. I'm 50 pages in already and can't put it down (I had to break to blog about these freaking Slans) but it's like I'm being stalked by the nerd police, if police were out to make you do stuff instead of getting you to stop doing stuff.

Observe:

Oscar had always been a young nerd - the kind of kid who read Tom Swift, who loved comic books and watched Ultraman - but by high school his commitment to the Genres had become absolute. Back when the rest of us were learning to play wallball and pitch quarters and drive our older brothers' cars and sneak dead soldiers from under our parents' eyes, he was gorging himself on a steady stream of Lovecraft, Wells, Burroughs, Howard, Alexander, Herbert, Asimov, Bova, and Heinlein...Could write in Elvish, could speak Chakobsa, could differentiate between a Slan, a Dorsai, and a Lensman in acute detail, knew more about the Marvel Universe than Stan Lee, and was a role-playing game fanatic.

I'm going to take comfort in the fact that, with maybe the exception of an H.P. Lovecraft story I had to read in college (fine, it was a science fiction writing class, happy? but I didn't do that well in it.), I've never read any of those authors and have no idea where Elvish and Chakobsa come from. Yes, I know Stan Lee but we've all seen Mallrats.

So STOP CALLING ME A NERD!!! For god's sake.

I'm fine. Really.

And I'm gonna go read some more about Oscar.

Here, have a picture of a panda in a tree.