User:Rkihara

I started reading adult SF when I was nine years old, after exhausting the children's section of the library. In those days, no one under eighteen could enter into the adult section of the library, so the librarian in the children's section would check out books for me from the adult section. After a couple of months, she talked the other librarians into letting me have an adult card, but I was restricted to the SF section only. I didn't have enough life experience at the time to understand the adult situations in the novels, but I enjoyed what I did understand. I remember being frightened by Bradbury's "Martian Chronicles" and awed by Van Vogt, especially "Far Centaurus," and creeped out by "The Sound"(?) from "The War against the Rull."

I read only books initially and didn't discover magazines until my early teens. A couple of years later at fifteen I started collecting SF magazines, but stopped at twenty-eight after graduating from college. For the next twenty-two years I collected only what I purchased from news stands until I was fifty. After that I started seriously collecting again, but now with much more disposable income I was able to triple the size of my collection in a short period of time. I discovered the ISFDB at about the same time and thought about contributing, but until now I didn't have the time.

After high school, I spent four years in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, working on airborne radars and interceptor electronic systems. I left the service with the rank of Staff-Sergeant, and financed my education by working as an apprentice electrician, a postal worker, and the GI Bill.

I've recently retired from electrical engineering after working on high-voltage pulsed-power systems, lasers, and particle accelerators for thirty-one years -- a career choice inspired by my love of science fiction. I originally thought that I'd be a scientist, but it seemed to me that the engineers were the people that got things done. I'm spending most of my time now on my hobbies; SF, languages (Japanese, and Russian), and astronomy.--Rkihara 19:16, 20 Aug 2007 (CDT)