Ever since then, I've been living in two directions. Physical reality carries me forward time, while my mind carries me backwards. You can imagine the fire set to my imagination when I read THE TIME MACHINE by H. G. Wells. You see I was never quite satisfied with the present, either I wanted to rush into the future, or jump backwards into time.

I started school about the time the Soviets put Sputnik into orbit, and graduated high school weeks before man landed on the moon. I was waiting for the future to unfold with the exploration of Mars or when we'd finally make contact with intelligent life on other worlds.

Boy did I love TV! My dad would scream at me, "get your goddamn face out of that TV and go play outside like a normal kid." I was normal. All my friends lived and died by the TV, and every day at school we'd savor the previous nights TV watching. In the late fifties a Sears TV was my time machine, with science fiction movies taking me forward in time, and westerns sending me back in time.

TV wasn't my only transportation in time. In 2nd grade, when I failed to read properly in my teacher's judgment, probably due to too much TV watching, my parents and teacher freaked and sent me to summer school. Hell, I could read, I just chose not to read the boring garbage they wanted us tykes to digest. Dick and Jane just didn't have the zing of HAVE GUN WILL TRAVEL.

Ah, but that summer school session changed everything. I don't remember the teacher, but I think it was a man, and he gave me a book about submarines called UP PERISCOPE. That was the ticket. All I needed was interesting reading material and I started to read like crazy. Books were like TV, but more powerful, like a Saturn V rocket. I'd go to the library and check out a dozen books at a time. Now my father yelled at me, "Get you goddamn face out of that book and go outside and play like a normal kid!"

My formative self now had two tools for traveling in time, but soon added a third. My parents were not into music, and we didn't have a radio or record player. Rock and roll came to me via the dashboard radio of a 55 Pontiac. Finally, in 1962 I got a radio for Christmas, which I played until it died in the summer of 67. I only turned it off when I left for school. When I got home, I switched it on and played AM rock and roll while reading SF books like Heinlein's Scribner books or Winston's Adventures in SF. I'd even sleep with the radio on. Then my dad would yell, "Shut off that goddamn music, and go out and play like a normal kid!"

So by 1962, I started systematically living in two directions. Since Olivier protests about my long log column, I shall only talk now about living backwards. Because no matter how much I think about the future, I'm more prone to live backwards in time.

Take science fiction for instance. Back then, SF was just those crazy books about the future. True enough, on the surface of things. A different slant showed I was reading past views of the future. H. G. Wells was long dead. Mariner spacecraft was telling me there were no Martians.

Seeing those photographs of Mars that looked like the airless craters on the moon did not stop me from reading Heinlein, Bradbury, Burroughs or Wells. At first, reading SF books felt like I was in another present, but I quickly learned that books were always old. I was always reading the opening pages of novels and looking at the list of books the author had written, and I knew I was digging through the past like some kind of bookworm archaeologist.

The same was true for TV, movies and music. I watched reruns on TV, preferred movies from the thirties, and enjoyed the special oldies shows on weekend radio. Take music for instance. As the sixties unfolded with it's dominating Rock paradigm, it was mind blowing of a different sorts to learn about Dave Brubeck, Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington. To complement Samuel R. Delany and Roger Zelazny, I would read Edgar Rice Burroughs, James Joyce, Raymond Chandler, Samuel Clemons and Jack Kerouac.

Right now I'm reading KING SOLOMON'S MINES, first published in 1885. Every day I read through my Turner Classic Movie schedule looking for choice forgotten films from the thirties. Tonight I plan to watch THE THIN RED LINE, a WWII picture. Every evening I scan eBay for pulps from the thirties and forties. Somehow I got hooked on the past.

My dream is to build a database that can generate views of the past. I'd like to punch in July 1933 and know what happened that year. What music did Doc Smith listen to while writing the LENSMEN series? What picture shows did John W. Campbell go to that might have influenced his stories?

Susie, my wife and Olivia and Kim, our friends, like to go out and party and live in the present. They can't understand why I spend my time living backwards. Maybe it's an addiction and I'm just a junkie for dying popular culture. Maybe the old man was right, and I should have gone out and played outside.

I also catch myself living backwards through my own past. The other night I was writing to Pat, an email friend in Texas, and we started discussing all the books series we read when we were young, like Danny Dunn, The Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, Oz books, and so on. The week before Susie was showing our wedding photos to Olivia, so I looked at them too, the first time in years and years. I was shocked to find how fascinated I was by those pics. It seems I even like myself better when viewed from a distance.

My work on SciFan is about organizing my expeditions into the past. I'd loved to read all the books in Christine's bibliography about Mars, and try to write a history of Mars that showed the evolution of Mars in our imaginations. Or I'd love to write a history of ASTOUNDING magazine and relate it the history of science at the time each issue was published.

The world wide web is an excellent time machine and it is getting better all the time. SciFan hasn't even made a scratch on the potential surface of what it could become. It will take time. I tend to think if Olivier and I stick to working on SciFan it will be a perfect journal of our expeditions into living backwards in time.