I’ve presented my own credentials above, and have stressed that this book is about the future – the training of the next generation as it carries nerd tradition forward. But I think it’s appropriate, in the process, to give a nod to the past.
In this book’s predecessor, Baby Boomer Fanboy, I point out that my own generation was the first generation of nerds to actually bear the name, and to present in society as a subculture. But that’s not to say that nerds didn’t exist before we came along.
In that book and in this one, I mention George McFly, father of Marty, in the Back to the Future films – a character who exemplifies the pre-Boomer nerd, born before World War II. We know there were such nerds, whether or not the word had yet been invented, and whether or not they were subculturally prominent: who else was there to buy Astounding Science Fiction and Amazing Stories and Heinlein’s novels? Who else was there to line up for Forbidden Planet and When Worlds Collide and The Day the Earth Stood Still?
We’ve established that nerd thought and behavior is genetically linked, so it must present in my own family tree, right? That’s where I will now turn, if only briefly.
One would expect, given the depth and breadth of the nerd dynamic at work in my own household, that I am descended from quite a line of them. In fact, the nerd gene runs recessive on both sides. But it's there!
To look at my parents, you wouldn’t think either one of them has the slightest trace of nerd lurking in their genes. I doubt either of them have ever watched a full episode of Star Trek or read even one comic book cover-to-cover. My mother only sat through the original Star Wars because I made her.
On the other hand, my mother is quite bookish, and my father is a tinkerer who has a weakness for fun tech. Remember CB radios, back in the Seventies? He enthusiastically bought one. He was proud to bursting when he bought our family a Panasonic stereo, and came up with a way for me to plug my guitar into it.
This may seem pretty thin, but there are other, less visible layers. My mother, who is exceedingly well-organized and orderly, has applied that mental tidiness to an encyclopedic knowledge of classical music; and my father, who isn’t particularly organized at all and probably can’t tell Chopin from Liszt, is nonetheless spontaneously creative with melodies, having crafted a number of tunes that have made their way into family lore. Both traits are nerdy, if in very different ways.
There are deeper clues in both extended families.
On my father’s side, there’s a tradition in the pastoral profession, with most of my uncles and cousins either pastors themselves or married to pastors, a tradition that isn’t exactly a nerd wellspring. But if you look, you’ll find some serious nerd in there: his little brother is a professional pilot – and not just a pilot, but a nerd pilot, with a deep love of aircraft of all kinds, the history of the field, and a boyish delight in both model planes and remote-control planes.
Two of my cousins – Kirk, my doppelganger, whom I wrote about extensively in Baby Boomer Fanboy, and his little brother, Jonathan – picked up on this love of planes. Both followed in Uncle Billy’s footsteps with the remote-control and model planes, and Kirk is an aficionado of military aircraft. Jonathan borrowed my copy of Firefox and never returned it.
Uncle Billy also took me aside once, gifting me with paperback copies of C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, which I enjoyed tremendously; and in the attic bedroom of our grandparents’ farmhouse, he left behind a copy of Rip Foster’s Assignment in Space!, which I absconded with and which sits on a shelf in my home, even today. That’s some serious nerd going on!
The genes, then, are there.
And on my mother’s side – well, I mentioned that my mother is bookish, and while it’s fair to say that she lacks a typical nerd’s obsessive tendencies, her father certainly did not: my maternal grandfather was as over-the-top book-crazy as I am, with endless bookcases stuffing his suburban Ohio home, overflowing with paperback mystery novels. Moreover, he reveled in the science essays of Isaac Asimov, whom I worship, and with every visit to his home I would discover new ones lying around.
My cousins Kirk and Jonathan had Robinson genes feeding their inner nerd, but they got some from the other side of their family, as well: their father was a first-generation computer professional, writing code and working on systems in the space program for IBM’s Federal Systems Division. That’s plenty nerdy in itself, but he also fed their deep sci-fi beasts, subscribing to Analog and providing plenty of Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury, and Heinlein. Best of all, he worked for many years in Huntsville, Alabama – Rocket City, USA – where resides the Space Museum, the US Space & Rocket Center. It’s more than a nerd can stand!
And well into my adulthood, in 1994, my mother surprised me utterly. She and her second husband met me in Lexington one evening when I was playing a band gig there, and she excitedly shared that the two of them had stumbled onto a wonderful new TV series that she was sure I would love...
The X-Files.
You’ve heard about my own nerd brood, but I should also mention my niece Kayla, daughter of my brother Dan, who consumes books like M&Ms – or my cousin Allie, daughter of Uncle Billy, who is likewise voracious in her literary appetite. Dan and Maxx, my brothers, continue to fly their nerd flags even today, and I’m fairly certain that I can count on the family’s nerd tradition continuing proudly.
But it’s so good to know where it came from...
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