Susriya Gangireddy: "Dear Lynne and Michael Damian Thomas: But I Don't Want to Grow Up"

But I Don’t Want to Grow Up

By

Susriya Gangireddy

My most difficult task of the day is finding my glasses, my most dreadful journey is the six minute trek from my room to my classes, and my happiest moment is finding that a test is postponed.

I’ve fallen into a commonplace schedule – the same mundane days of which I was terrified as a child as it would officially render me boring and an adult. As much as I want to stay a child forever, I can’t deny that I’ve been maturing. But growing up means responsibilities and reality and routine. Peter Pan has been my idol since I was little; I still like to believe that Neverland exists somewhere out there. With him, he carried a hope of staying young and carefree forever. A hope of forgetting our problems.  A hope of going on incredible adventures instead.

            I find this hope in science fiction and fantasy books. They are doorways to different worlds and different times. Reading allows me to escape the stress of every day and become immersed in a life that is not my own. After waiting, quite unsuccessfully, for my Hogwarts letter or any sign that I’m actually a demigod, I’ve realized that my Call to Adventure comes through books, by tagging along on the journeys of various characters.

David Hartwell’s claims that young teenagers obsess over science fiction are, from my experience, fairly true. I don’t want to lose the passion I had for books when I was at the golden age of twelve. But recently, my creativity is dwindling, and that scary thought is enough incentive for me to continue reading what I love most. However, I have an inconvenient need to finish a book once I’ve started it, occasionally meaning I spend an entire day just reading. I envy those who can allot certain chapters to read over the course of a couple of days. Short stories are different. Even during school days, it’s not difficult to read a short story for half an hour while still managing my time well.

I’ve learned that change isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Yes, sometimes this change means crazy plot twists like in Bester’s “Fondly Fahrenheit” where it’s not technology that’s the villain. Sometimes, this means I’m too emotionally attached to characters that I lose sleep when something drastically unfortunate happens to them, like poor Nahum in Lovecraft’s “The Colour out of Space”. Sometimes, it means a death or even the fall of an entire civilization as in Godwin’s “The Cold Equation” or Forster’s The Machine Stops.

But these unpredictable plots, the different types of characters rather than the stereotypical protagonist, and the overall rejection of the status quo without the cheesy happily ever after endings are exactly what I love about short science fiction and fantasy. The stories do so much in so few words. And in that way, I think that short stories are much more difficult to write than novels, but it also makes them that much better.

What I’ve read in this class has helped me open my mind to reading different types of literature rather than my usual select favorites. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz and Walton’s Among Others, for example. Before this class, I stayed far away from difficult language in books, such as in Canticle. Yet, the book was very successful in capturing and maintaining my interest from the very beginning through the comedic endeavors of Brother Francis and the intriguing lifestyle among monks. I also used to think that books written through diary entries were terribly cliché and lacking in depth, so I was initially disappointed when our class decided to read Among Others. But I was quickly proven wrong in thinking that it would be shallow. Morwenna is an intricate, complex character who easily stood out from the majority of protagonists I’ve gotten to know through diary entries, and she had a fresh sense of reality with her.  

Sci-fi and fantasy books give me a consolation that nothing else could. They reassure me that there is more than just integrals and thermochemistry out there. They reassure me that there’s more to life than it seems. And most importantly, they reassure me that everyone has a purpose. I once read a Humans of New York post, “I can’t seem to be a pessimist long enough to overlook the possibility of things being overwhelmingly good,” and I believe I now have a more positive mindset about my disappointingly non-magical life by trying to see every day as an adventure.