Take my hand, dear reader, and let’s take a leisurely stroll down Nostalgia Lane to revisit our roots. The “we” in the “our” is us: nerds, geeks, genre fans. And our roots are the beginnings, those first books or games or sites or images we stumbled upon as children that started the itch, that itch for the fantastic that leads some people to—as adults—spend thousands of dollars cosplaying at Comic Con while others look on in bemused confusion.

I am the person I am today because of the books I read as a child. This is a fact I am absolutely sure of and something I can plot the course of my life by. For me, this can be seen in the general and specific: I work at Tor because for my entire life, my personal bookshelves have been stamped with the little mountain top logo and when I turned my eyes to publishing, there was only one company that sprung to mind. But also on the broad scale, I will always pause by the fairy tchotchkes in truck stops and make a beeline for the genre section in any bookstore, likely until the day I die. F/SF is in my bones.

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