I don’t mean really old books, caked in dust and bound in human skin. I’m talking about reference books, mostly published in the 70′s and 80′s, that were designed to inspire a generation of children into careers in science and innovation for the good of… all mankind.
On the surface, there wouldn’t seem to be anything creepy about them or the optimistic world-view they propose. But when I cast my mind back, I can’t help but find something unsettling about my memories of those books… something that goes beyond the stains on the pages and that weird smell they had.
I used to read a lot of books about space. About NASA and the space shuttles. I remember poring through pages filled with brightly coloured drawings of Cape Canaveral, diagrams of the solar system (pluto included) and an assortment of astronaut apparatus: helmets, gloves, phazers, moon buggies.
But then, eventually, I’d turn the page and see something else. Maybe, first, a diagram I couldn’t understand. And beside that something else. A photograph taken on the moon.
A photograph of empty grey nothing.
And attributed so much importance! There were even whole books about this desolate grey space rock, tethered to our planet by gravity, swinging around and around it.
Of course, I thought it was great. What eight-year-old wouldn’t want to stand on the moon and hit golf balls into space? But that’s not to say that I understood it.
I didn’t know, for example, that the “space race” was fuelled by nuclear tensions between the United States and Russia. I’m sure some of the books mentioned it, but I wouldn’t have understood. Not really. The best I could have hoped for was to have seen the Russians as cartoon villains: Boris and Natasha infiltrating NASA.
But the concept of nuclear war to an eight-year-old? A complex tapestry of political tensions set against the backdrop of another barely-understood war in which the villains also starred in Indiana Jones movies?
I barely even understand that stuff now.
But maybe the books weren’t actually creepy at the time. In fact, I think a lot of things might seem creepier when later viewed through the mechanical lens of a Retrospekt (they go whirr-tick-whirrr).
Perhaps it’s more about what the books didn’t have in them. The story behind the story: the reality behind it. But it’s not just that, because I still can’t shake this feeling that there is something about those books that’s inherently creepy, something seperate from any context involving nuclear wars or Martians or Bigfoot or Nazis.
Or, maybe, something involving all of them, together, like those drawings in books about “dinosaur times” that show dozens of different species clamouring for space on the page.
What where all those dinosaurs even doing there at the same time? Were they meeting up? It is understood that many dinosaurs actually preferred to eat each other, rather than stand around all day waiting for photo-ops.
I guess it’s all down to Gamblen and Gamblen or some other fictional book publisher that I just made up to explain themselves.
Want to try out the Retrospekt while we wait?
