Starlog was never my mag. The few issues of that ever made it to my part of the world were hideously overpriced, and always seemed more focus on the bright and photogenic stars of the science-fiction films and TV it covered, rather than the stories and themes.
Still, when I saw Starlog #155 in a $2 bin at a weirdly understocked bookstore in a quiet shopping centre on the very edge of town, you bet your arse I snapped it up. We were still two years behind on Star Trek The Next Generation, getting a glimpse of Colm Meany's first roles as O'Brien was enough because that was like seeing into the future.
As the dorkiest of dorky teenagers, one of the greatest pleasures in my life was rattling around town on my cheap bike, stopping at every dairy and bookstore that might have something, some comic or magazine or novel that I couldn't get anywhere else.
And now decades later, my brain still retains the most useless of information, because I can still remember exactly where I got this Starlog.
The place I bought it is now a church community centre and has been for years now, the bookstore closed a long, long time ago. But sometimes, when I go back home for a visit, I still find myself driving past that same site.
Which is a ridiculous thing to do, but I really fucking loved getting that cheap magazine, that one day, long ago. It was full of cool shit and it introduced me to the vast and sprawling world of Philip Jose Farmer, with a chunky article about his writing, and I was right at that age when one magazine article can set you off in a whole new direction.
It still took me ages to find A Feast Unknown and I still haven't ever seen one of the Doc Caliban books, because no matter how interesting Starlog made it sound ,it still wasn't the kind of thing I would find at my local bookstores.
I still have that issue of Starlog in a box under the bed, (along with the following issue, which I found years and years later at the best Australian comic book store I ever visited, because I desperately needed to read the second half of the Farmer article). I couldn't get rid of that kind of personal history, even if it's an average issue of an average magazine - sometimes that all I needed.
And even though I'm starting to clean out the collection of nerd shit I have, in preparation for a return to my old hometown, where the kids will be going to preschool a couple of kilometers from that haunted bookstore, I'll surely be taking that Starlog with me.
It's more of a historic document now - that brief glimpse into TNG's near future is very old news these days - but I'm still getting dividends from that two dollar investment in a dusty magazine. We get our pleasures where we can, man.
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When I go back to Beckenham, my home town in south London, I sometimes walk or drive past the corner building that used to be the newsagent that sold American DC comics, where I bought Detective Comics #526 sometime in the spring of 1983 (along with other Batmans, Tecs, Legion ofSuper-Heroes etc). The newsagent is long gone, but I still like to go past its former site, and even on occasion point it out to my disinterested daughter.
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