San Diego Lightfoot Sue and other stories Book

San Diego Lightfoot Sue
By Tom Reamy, 1976 Nebula Award

It was the Silver Age of Science Fiction, the 1970s were. Or was it golden? Isaac said gold was the 1950s, but. The 70s had Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Robert Silverberg, Isaac hisself, Frederik Pohl, A. E. Van Vogt, Roger Zelazny, Ursula Le Guin, Frank Herbert, Jack L. Chalker, Larry Niven, Ben Bova, C. J. Cherryh, Spider Robinson, Theodore Sturgeon, and many others were at the top of their game. Maybe Isaac meant that many, like himself got started with the whole genre in the 1950s. Pick up Dune, or The Weapon Shops of Isher, or even the Callahan Bar stories. You might find the now in them. Don't leave out the Nathan Brazil books, them that were written long before The Matrix ever was thought of.

San Diego Lightfoot Sue is a love story from that time in the middle of the 20th Century when there was no Internet, and Kansas and Los Angeles were still different places that were still a bit mysterious to each other's inhabitants. People could actually travel between the two without papers then, to document their own place in the bipolar America of the 21st Century, lest they forget who they are and why what they believe is the only truth for all. The story is only a tiny bit science fiction, only maybe 1%. The other 99% is people. An innocent kid from the heartland that loses that jewel that we all ultimately must surrender when time and life force it from our grasp. It has gay people before gay rights and tells them as just people. Maybe that is the seeing the future that science fiction often has in it. There is an old prostitute in it, before they were "sex workers" or something to trot out on the local news to titillate at 11. She is an artist, not to give away the story, human too. And there is love in the story, forbidden love of a kind, but real in its portrayal.

It is well worth a read. Who knows, you may see the future - and the past in it. Those are the best kind, after all.