In my columns over the years, I've sometimes referred to the "Nerd Canon" (which has amused my editors no end). These are the books that the fanboys and fangirls in my generation sought out as the seminal works we needed to have read to have nerd cred.
Now, the Nerd Canon isn't static (nor should it be). It varies from generation to generation. But we all get the idea.
Then again, some books in the Nerd Canon aren't negotiable. I mean, a compleat comics fans knows Asimov's "Laws of Robotics" by heart.
My reading of the Nerd Canon started in elementary school library, where I instinctively began searching out anything that wasn't "normie." I'm pretty sure that's when I got the mythology bug. By junor high I was reading Edgar Allan Poe for sure -- my school library had a complete Poe, which I devoured -- all the Tarzan novels, lots of sword & sorcery (Conan, Fafhrd & Gray Mouser, etc.), "classic" SF writers like H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, the Universal monter ouevre (Dracula, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, etc.) and others. By the time I'd graduated from high school I'd read the Foundation trilogy, the Dune trilogy, Lord of the Rings, best of Robert Heinlein, best of Ray Bradbury (or possibly all available, as I really loved Bradbury), Michael Moorcock's Elric (and some of his other Eternal Champion stuff), some A.E. Van Vogt, some Philip K. Dick, a smattering of Harlan Ellison, Phillip Jose Farmer, E.E. "Doc" Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, and others. I also read every Star Trek novel through the early '90s, but what started as a trickle in the late 1970s became a flood and I dropped them.
I eventually gave up on trying to be comprehensive on prose when cyberpunk came along. I read Neuromancer and didn't care for it, and discovered that I was completely out of step with SF fans. So I gave that up and stuck with comics.
If you're still reading at this point then I have some questions:
1) What was YOUR Nerd Canon? How does it differ or overlap with what I said above?
2) When I bought all those stories years ago, I bought them in paperback. That was in the '60s and early '70s. In the '80s, I sold my whole hoard to local bookstores for a couple of bucks -- less than a penny on the dollar. They simply weren't holding up. My Conan books, for example, were literally sticking to each other, and when you pried them apart, parts of the cover would be torn off. I don't know why that was, but it was. There was no point keeping them. So I got rid of them, to make room for stuff that would last.
And that brings us to the point of this thread. (At least for me.) I'm going to go ahead and buy some nice replacements for those old books. I've ordered some nice HC versions of the first four Tarzan books. I've got a gilt-edge Complete Sherlock Holmes collection, and will soon have similar for Conan.
So what else should I have for the library I will build and totter about in my dotage? What is my Endgame Nerd Canon?
Sound off, Legionnaires!
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Nerd Test:
If someone asks you "What's Green Lantern's secret identity?", you should know at least half a dozen correct answers to that question. (Alan Scott, Hal Jordan, Guy Gardner, John Stewart, Kyle Rayner, Charlie Vickers, Len Lewis, Simon Baz, Jessica Cruz, Sojourner Mullein, and that's just human GL's off the top of my head.)
Can I do it with Flashes?
Jay Garrick, Barry Allen, Wally West, Lia Nelson,Mary Maxwell, John Fox...
About 20 years ago my son and his friends came inside and dove into a box of quarter books I had for just such an occasion. My son got into a bit of a kerfuffle with one of the other kids. The Flash was mentioned and my son, rightly, wanted to know whether he was refering to Jay-Flash, Barry-Flash, or Wally-Flash. I was so proud.
Aye, you raised him a-rightly.
It isn't comics, but part of my nerd canon is Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series of police procedural crime novels. Also the Encyclopedia Brown series of mysteries for kids.
Back when I used to care about Star Trek, I read several of the James Blish episode adaptations, and acquired (and still have) first editions of Starfleet Technical Manual and the Star Fleet Medical Manual. And definitely David Gerrold's books The Trouble With Tribbles (about how he wrote the script for that Star Trek episode, which was his first sale, and the making of the episode) and The World of Star Trek.
Also, early forerunners of trade paperback collections -- Stan Lee's The Origins of Marvel Comics, Son of Origins of Marvel Comics, Bring On the Bad Guys and The Superhero Women.
Comics histories, such as Les Daniels' Comix, volumes 1 and 2 of The Steranko History of Comics, All in Color for a Dime, Jules Pfeiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes (my first edition prints only one page of Captain Marvel's origin story from Whiz Comics #2, for fear of upsetting the then-tenuous legal situation between DC and Fawcett).
And, of course, Michael L. Fleischer's wonderful works, The Encyclopedia of Comic Book Heroes, the Batman volume, the Wonder Woman volume, and the Superman volume (published as The Great Superman Book).
Oh, and of course Superman from the '30s to the '70s and Batman from the '30s to the '70s.
I would read any original Star Trek paperback that I could find.
Ditto for any Peanuts collection.
There was the Secret Origins of Super DC Heroes book that was a boon for a Golden Age fan like me.
I absorbed the Fleisher books as well as Jeff Rovin's Pictorial History of Science Fiction, Encyclopedia of Super-Heroes, ...Super-Villains and...Monsters.
Plus numerous books on Greek mythology!
I mentioned somewhere else that I read all the Star Trek books until, probably the mid-'90s. There were exactly four Star Trek books for a decade after the show went off the air: The Making of Star Trek, The World of Star Trek, Spock Must Die! and The Trouble with Tribbles. I remember this vividly, because it looked like Star Trek was dead, and I was going to one lonely Star Trek fan for life. (I was not aware of the conventions that were keeping the fandom alive.) Then Star Wars happened, upending the conventional wisdom that SF didn't sell. Then Star-Trek-in-print sprang to life with the 1979 movie, and novels started flowing. At first sporadically, then in a steady stream, then by the late '80s a bloody flood -- like a two a month, plus BTS and making of and memoirs and whatnot. It got to be too much, especially as the quality went down. (I read far too many fanfics masquerading as Star Trek novels. I don't remember which book it was, but one writer inserted a loosely-disguised version of herself as a new ensign on the Enterprise that BOTH Kirk and Spock fell in love with. Bleah.) Eventually I stopped buying them, and then sold them off -- I had hundreds -- to make room in the Cave. I think I've had my fill at this point, but I'm glad they continue to exist. (And I still have some HCs that I will unload at some point, as I will never re-read them, and they take up space. But I'm loathe to unload them like I did the PBs, for pennies on the dollar.)
Most modern science fiction prose leaves me cold. One of the criteria I follow for enjoyable SF reading is a book published pre-1980 which usually means a novel length of 200 pages or less. Even if it isn't the greatest, being relatively short you can have it read in a couple days then move onto something else. If you are looking to fill in gaps from your earlier science fiction reading, used book stores and library book sales have been a good source for me in finding these type of books.
There is quite a bit of overlap between your “nerd canon” and mine, Cap. I don’t see any glaring omissions, but I would add Ian Fleming’s James Bond… not any one book, the entire series.
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