Dave Hackbarth
Cadet
I’m looking for the title and author of a story I recall reading while teaching a high school English elective class in Science Fiction in the early 1970s. Recalling some main plot points, it is likely I came across it in a fantasy or sci-fi anthology.
It’s a story about a reader in this mundane world who drags himself home at the end of the day to gain some mental stimulus in reading a book about some fantastic adventurer who only wants to escape his hectic life by reading a book which turns out to feature the afore-mentioned mundane reader as central character. Each seeks the other as needed fictional subject matter. I remember thinking how the circularity of this story was likely inspired by Borges or Cortazar, reflective of the boom in magic realism of late-sixties, early seventies imaginations. I do remember that the more fantastic, less mundane reader was aboard some version of a freighter on what I took to be some alien ocean. Help!?!
It’s a story about a reader in this mundane world who drags himself home at the end of the day to gain some mental stimulus in reading a book about some fantastic adventurer who only wants to escape his hectic life by reading a book which turns out to feature the afore-mentioned mundane reader as central character. Each seeks the other as needed fictional subject matter. I remember thinking how the circularity of this story was likely inspired by Borges or Cortazar, reflective of the boom in magic realism of late-sixties, early seventies imaginations. I do remember that the more fantastic, less mundane reader was aboard some version of a freighter on what I took to be some alien ocean. Help!?!