I sometimes quip that I might be in a minority of one: when I first encountered Star Trek, I thought it was a book series.
It happened sometime in 1983, the year I turned eight. I’d been a precocious reader, and was reading at a fifth-grade level by the age of 5. I progressed to standard adult-level reading during that next year; and by a couple of years after that was actually starting to get bored with reading. I could get through an “age appropriate” chapter book in an hour, and through a “teen” level book in an afternoon.
The problem? While my reading ability was well above my chronological age, my social and emotional development were both right in line with it. So was the amount of life experience I’d had at that point. As such, despite the fact that I was hungry for more complicated books, there weren’t that many out there. True “adult” books discussed themes and situations that I didn’t understand — not because I couldn’t read the words, but because I wasn’t yet able to pick up the context.
One afternoon, as I was noodling about being bored, my father was reading M.S. Murdock’s Web of the Romulans and laughing out loud at some points. Intrigued, I asked if I could read it too. Dad thought about it for a moment and decided that it was probably all right for my age. While he finished it, he told me, it would be a good idea for me to go through the Blish Readers he had on our bookshelves.
I did. And I was entranced. To this day I can still remember that the very first episode adaptation I read was “Arena.”