Snared

La Mère reports the ultimate success of Project Mothership: my father has been drawn irrevocably into The Book of the New Sun. This represents the culmination of a long strange campaign to bring him into the SFF fold.

Understand, my mother was geek before geek had chic. Seesterperson and I learned to read chapter books with Robert Heinlein juveniles, and we learned the dangers of transgressing the alpha-author system if we mucked with the carefully organized SF bookshelf in the basement. But somehow Il Padre remained above it all. I think at some point in the 70s he picked up an Anne McCaffrey book and was thoroughly put off; suggestions that he might like something in the genre were invariably met with sniffy comments about preferring books where the characters' names weren't seven consonants followed by an apostrophe. (Presumably he also disdains Welsh literature.)

After he retired, he spent several years reading yet more clergy lit: lives of the saints, liturgics, missals, antique histories. By now we had all long resigned ourselves to the alien in our midst and didn't bother. Different strokes and all that.

Step one in his metamorphosis, oddly enough, was picking up the Patrick O'Brian books, which God knows aren't easy reading but which are rich and beautiful and which had kept La Mère sane on a trans-Pacific flight. "Huh," he said to La Mè, "These are actually pretty good." She forbore to whack him in the head. "What else would you recommend?"

With the careful slow movements of a hunter drawing a bead on a twenty-point stag, she proffered Guards! Guards! Glomph. A month later, the entire Pratchett oeuvre to date satisfactorily digested, Il Padre sat back and said judiciously, "Well, not everything he's done is great. Those early books are not up to spec." No, we agreed, and notice that we'd started him with one of the later titles. "Anyway. What else is good?" We were off and running.

By now he's spent several years getting through the good stuff, the cream skimmed from the 90% junk that Sturgeon's Law so accurately predicts, and we've ended up wracking our brains for ways to keep the beast fed. I was gleeful to remember an old favorite, Poul Anderson's shimmering Three Hearts and Three Lions, that he of course adored; La Mère watched in shock as he finished the entire Cordwainer Smith collection. We were running low on stock, and he was no neophyte. It was time.

"You should try Gene Wolfe. He's good, and you'd probably get some of his more obscure Catholic references."
"I've tried. I can't."
"Well, he's not easy. It took me three good runs, but it's worth it."
"Nope. Can't do it."

We had variations on that conversation every few months; I had basically given up. We knew he would like it, but the learning curve with Mr. Unreliable Narrators FTW is admittedly steep. But leading a horse to water and all that...you can't really force someone to read something they don't like. Can you?

*ring ring*
"Hello?"
"Hey, kiddle. So guess who has been sitting on the couch for the last week, spending every free moment snarfling down the Severian stories?"
"Holy shit! How'd you do it?"
"I left the books lying around, and when he asked why I hadn't put them away I told him I was trying to lure him."
"And he went for it! What's his reaction?"
"He says it was unkind in us not to warn him that it's really just one long book."
"Hee. So very doomed."
"I know. So then I told him that not only is it one long book, you have to reread it afterward to figure out what the hell went on."
"True, true. Aw, our little grasshopper."
"Yup. Now he is the master."

Io Triumphe!