Thank You For Coming To My Ted Talk

No hate for Tom Swift https://t.co/tbtYiAC8iR

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) May 17, 2022

I was a huge fan of Tom Swift when I was a kid. There's a high probability I had this book, although I don't remember at all which ones I had. My nostalgia-driven inner child sees this and wishes I'd kept the ones I had (yeah, like I'd have dragged them with me through high school, college, and 45 years of marriage.) OTOH, I still have all my paperback (Bantam!) copies of Ray Bradbury books, which I scouted in drug stores (back when they had racks of paperbacks, the kind I only see now in Half-Price Books) in my adolescence (after I'd turned my back on the works of Victor Appleton II). All those covers with bleak landscapes and wild imagery for The Illustrated Man and The Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked This Way Comes and The Golden Apples of The Sun.

Each one boldly emblazoned with the legend:

"The World's Greatest Living Science-Fiction Writer"

What 12 year old boy could doubt it?

Bradbury wrote that he'd collected Sunday comic strips of "Prince Valiant"("in the days of King Arthur") in his childhood, and still had them in boxes in his attic.  I collected Bradbury paperbacks, and still have a shelf full of them in a bookcase.  I discarded Tom Swift and seldom think about it.  I'd as soon lose my wife and child as lose those Bradbury books.