From A to Z and beyond?

Okay, this post is a bit different. There's no music. This post is about the other thing we listened to on long road trips: Alan himself. He really liked science fiction, as do I. He would find full text stories and read them to us. Each title below is a link to the text online. I don't know if anyone will actually do this except for me, but try reading these stories out loud and imagine his voice.

Asimov

The Last Question 

In this short story, people ask a computer of their making a question that cannot be answered, or can it? The answer is not 42. Alan read this to me and Isabelle on one of our trips to Wisconsin to see Mom and Dad. This was one of the first.

If you do read it, check out this website.

The Last Answer

This story, published 24 years after the previous story, is about an entirely different question, almost the opposite in fact. Alan read these to us back to back. Despite my extensive Asimov collection, somehow I had missed these gems of his work. Knowing now the questions that were going through Alan's head, I wonder how this darkly humorous take on existence resonated with him.

Nightfall

Read to me and his friend Laura on our way back from New Orleans on our last family road trip. In it, he ponders a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God!

Let's just say that's not how things unfold. This was the last story he read out loud to me. The last line haunts me as I hear it in his voice: "The long night had come again."

Zelazny

The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth

Roger Zelazny is my favorite sci-fi author. This is not his best story. For that, you might want to check out A Rose for Ecclesiastes. These two stories were the pre-Space Age sci-fi era's last hurrah, writings about Venus and Mars at the moment just before we knew what was on them (or what wasn't). This particular short story, The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth, stretches the definition of short a bit, but bear with it. To get the full experience, try reading it in a variety of mediocre southern accents, with one of the characters sounding remarkably like Cleveland from Family Guy.

For Isabelle and me, this story, in those voices, is a strong memory of who Alan was -- realizing that the character with the thickest southern accent was from the Midwest halfway through the reading, complaining about the spotty 3G/4G internet access on the road, lines alternating between masterfully delivered and awkward due to trouble reading on a phone screen in a moving car.

Beyond?

Frankly, I don't know what comes next. Reading stories has been hard for me since he left us -- too hard to concentrate. I do see irony in Alan's reading speculative fiction about the distant (on not-so-distant) future when he couldn't even picture his own tomorrow. I think Alan would want us all to look forward, though, in that way that he couldn't.