The Last Starfighter is showing on HBO. I don’t know who would be familiar with this movie. It has rather an unusual genre. About a teenage boy that plays a flight sim video game, early 80’s, and the game turns out to be a trainer/testor for an alien race that’s at war. All the native pilots are masquered in a meteor attack on their base before they can take off. And this kid is the only one that is trained and away at the time. Of course, he turns back the main assault in a souped up fighter just like in the game.
This movie holds a special place for me. I actually got something out of my dad from it. This was very rare. Dad just didn’t do a lot of nice things like family activities. Anyway, this movie was playing in the theaters and I got the book. It was ~300 pages or something. And he said if I finished the book we could see the movie. There was no movie theater in Canadian at the time. So, a trip to Amarillo was required and a movie was very rare indeed. This was a brand new, super duper computer generated, ultra realistic, movie about a kid in a no-name trailer park who becomes a hero. What geek wouldn’t find this appealing?
I struggled with the book. It was good, but that was a lot of pages. I never read that many pages before. It just didn’t seem possible to finish it all. Somehow, I did and Dad had to pay up. Going to the movies was a big deal.
Equally significant was finishing my first big book. After this I started going through my Dad’s collection, oldest first. Starting with Jules Verne, HG Wells, Tom Swift books, and moving towards Asimov, Clark, Ben Bova, Niven, etc.
The reason I’m writing this is that I just noticed the copyright date for the movie was 1984. At that time I was 8 or 9. So, if you ever wonder about my pronunciation or my vocabulary just imagine a 9 or 10 yr old reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in 80 Days, Mysterious Island (one of my favorites), War of the Worlds,.. What is that like 4th grade? I was using Kindergarten pronunciation rules on words that no one around me spoke.
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Over the years, I learned a lot more from science fiction books than you would think. Vocabulary and concepts like anti-matter. Each author seemed to have a fetish for explaining some particular detail or the story would revolve around it. There would be 3 pages of science slipped into the action right when you are the most interested.
Later, when we had English in High School I resented it a great deal. I read more books than they proscribed and had been doing so for years. Being forced to read this or that. And you know what most of them were crap. Utter crap. I have taken to going back and reading some of the “seminal” works. And I call “bullshit”. What’s the one with the kids on the island that kill Porky or whatever? I believed everything then and I did NOT believe this.
Let’s talk about the influences on George Orwell as he aged. Yeah, because we don’t want to live like that book 1984. He was British by the way and they have more cameras per capita than anywhere on the planet. Were was Jules Verne or Alexandre Dumas (3 Musketeers, the Count of Monte Cristo,..) or Arthur C Clark predicting satellites?
Anyway, the last part is a rant that you an ignore. 
Hey you’re not the only one that liked “The Last Starfighter”. That was an awesome movie!! I like watching it every now and then. Reading everything science fiction was always my thing. Why does it sound that you were amazed that you were reading so much at that age? 300 pages was nothing. By the time I had finished at my grade school, I had read the entire fiction section and most of the non-fiction that was interesting. LOL!!