“We’ve forgotten much. How to struggle, how to rise to dizzy heights and sink to unparalleled depths. We no longer aspire to anything. Even the finer shades of despair are lost to us. We’ve ceased to be runners. We plod from structure to conveyance to employment and back again. We live within the boundaries that science has determined for us. The measuring stick is short and sweet. The full gamut of life is a brief, shadowy continuum that runs from gray to more gray. The rainbow is bleached. We hardly know how to doubt anymore.” – Richard Matheson, in “The Thing”
When I was a kid and just getting into science fiction, there were lots of stories that really spoke to me –
The monster older brother chained up in the attic; the gremlin, that only “Captain Kirk” could see, tearing into the engine of a plane; a box with a button that if pushed could get you a million dollars, and kill someone you didn’t even know; the last man on earth fighting diseased vampires; Captain Kirk being split into good and evil men by a transporter malfunction; a man shrinking until he was so small he was the biggest thing in the next universe (“To God there is no Zero. I still exist…”)
When I got a little older I was moved to tears when Superman saw that penny from his present and had to return from an idyllic love in the past, and Chester was being menaced by an insane truck driver.
They all turned out to be Richard Matheson. At the core, his stories always put ordinary people in fantastic situations and asked “What would a person do, pushed to these limits and beyond?”
He’s missed.