No one owns a theme. But the creators of Starman have shown that they
share some of the beliefs that you express in your subjects. Their young
men of the stars prove that they too are brave, adventurous and willing
to sacrifice for freedom and justice. With a loyalty toward each other
that would create envy in every generation, they test themselves against
cunning scoundrels. As they conquer villains, they, and we along with
them, learn whether they measure up. Will they prove themselves worthy
as young people have done for all time? Young readers can have a chance
to preview something about their own lives and the world they will live
in. And just as you believed, somehow the human race survives. If the
world of Starman is an accurate guess on the future, then the good guys,
the ones in the white spacesuits, will continue to prevail and produce
more young people to keep the dream alive. I hope that some of the next
generation of courageous young people will read this series.
Your fans don’t know that you started writing seriously relatively early
in life, in the 1920’s and ’30’s, first as a teen for your personal
pleasure and then on your school newspaper at New Utrecht High School in
Brooklyn, New York. Did having to learn the English language after
speaking Russian until the age of seven help you become a better writer?
Were your poems and letters to Mom valuable both to her and to your
professional development? Did the comic books you authored during the
Golden Age of comics give you a better sense of story-telling and
dialogue or did it degrade your love of language? I know that writing
television scripts and other creative projects supported the family
during the difficult years of the 1950’s, but how did it affect your
later work with Digby Allen? So many of your themes are repeated and
reworked in several of your creations right through to the late 1980’s.
Who would guess that you once wrote a paper on the use of the raven in
several of Shakespeare’s plays? Or that you wrote biology text to
accompany a new medium, slides made from strips of 35-mm film? Would
admirers realize that you were most interested in world events, but read
the sports section of the New York Times first, everyday? I’m certain
your fans wouldn’t have read the American Elsewhen Almanac, a
compilation of bits of Americana and commentary that you published in
the 1980’s.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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