The Past Was A Different Country

     The loss of every single electronic parts place in Indianapolis still gnaws at me.  We had so much, and now there's nothing.  Likewise, our homegrown supermarket chains and department stores have faded -- Eavey's (I may have misremembered the name), O'Malia's, Marsh, Block's, L. S. Ayres -- all gone.

     The little independent used book stores are almost all gone, too, and most of them went away before Half-Price Books moved into the vacant niche.  Don't get me wrong; I like HPB a lot and I hope they stick around.  But I grew up going to the crowded old stores, filling a paper grocery bag with beat-up paperbacks for five dollars (about thirty bucks in 2024 money) and reading for a month.  You'd take the books you didn't like back for credit against the next bagful.  Broad Ripple's Book Exchange was a good one, but it faded away.  Most of them didn't make much profit, a bare living for the owner after rent and utilities, a haven for a bibliophile.

     It's easy to turn nostalgic, longing for a lost past.  But we forget the bad parts -- I was working in small-town radio, at bare-living wages.  That fiver for a bag of books was a luxury expense.  Ramen was a staple and fast food was a rare treat.

     Watching a documentary about the the Star Trek universe of TV shows and films, I encountered mention of an episode of Deep Space 9 that features the staff of a late-1940s or early '50s science fiction magazine -- with the cast of DS9 playing all the roles, out of makeup and costume.  I'd never heard of it, and in this age of streaming and on-demand video, it took thirty seconds and $1.99 to call it up.  A far cry from that five-dollar bag of used books!

     Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess used similar conceits a few times, Hercules in humorous self-mockery.  "Far Beyond the Stars" is not played for laughs.  Benjamin Sisko, as "Benny Russell" is an SF writer, alongside cast members playing writers modeled on Isaac Asimov, William Tenn and other Futurians, possibly Eric Frank Russell and Damon Knight, C. L. Moore and Andre Norton, under an editor who looks a bit like John W. Campbell, working in a "writer's room" (something TV programs have and SF magazines quite definitely do not; but I'll give them that).  Without giving too much away, the storyline sends an overstressed Sisko into hallucinating or dreaming events that roughly parallel what happened when Samuel R. Delany's novel Nova, already headed for hardback publication by Doubleday, was rejected for serialization in Analog magazine in 1967.

     Galaxy magazine and a few of that time's bigger names in printed SF are namechecked and it's a well-made episode, with levels of resonance that connect the story-within-a-story to the larger arc of DS9.  And it's a reminder that the past was far from halcyon.