Free Luke Skywalker Can't Read by Ryan Britt Page A

“dragon” or “unicorn” or “dinosaur” around the same time as “horse,” “dog,” and “barn,” but understanding the difference between words for make-believe and words for real things is tough when make-believe is such a big part of the inner workings of your child brain.
    If you’ve ever read a really good alternate-universe novel like China Mieville’s
The City and the City
or anything by PaulPark or the challenging dystopian jam
A Clockwork Orange
, then you know how this goes. You have to put in placeholder “blanks” for words you don’t really get. I think because of the hardwiring of sci-fi to myself as a child, I still deal with unknown words and concepts in the same way one might read
A Clockwork Orange
, minus the glossary.
    â€œSymphony,” my mother said, seeing through my lie, “means there aren’t any words, and this tape is just going to be lots of instruments playing the music from the movies.” She made it sound like I wanted to buy one of those tapes that just had whale sounds on it. She didn’t get it. But I was relieved and bobbed my head up and down excitedly. By questioning the whole “symphony” thing, she’d had me worried for a second; maybe this excellent cassette tape I’d spotted in Sam Goody wasn’t what I wanted at all. But it was. This was the soundtrack to a better, more adventurous world. Yes. This is what I wanted.
    The tape was
Star Trek: The Astral Symphony
, a 1991 release that was a “greatest hits” collection featuring selections from the scores to the first five Star Trek films. As a preteen, the musicians I first memorized were not members of New Kids on the Block or the guys in Blur (that would come later) but instead the composers who worked on the Star Trek films. Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner, and Leonard Rosenman were actually the only three composers on this particular compilation, since the composer Cliff Eidelman was too new. He’d just done the music for the sixth Star Trek film, and I was going to have to buy that one as a separate tape when I saved up enough money, which, almost six months later, I did. In contrast to the previous, sunnier Star Trek movie scores, Eidelman’s score for
The Undiscovered Country
is super-dark, so much so I actually believed wholeheartedly it must have been the same guy who did the music for the 1989
Batman
film. I was wrong about this, of course, since that score was composed by Danny Elfman, who has gone on to do lots of movies you probably like, while Eidelman’s resume mostly consists of that one Star Trek movie and
Free Willy 3: The Rescue.
*
    If sci-fi television can prevent a child from enjoying kitchen-sink dramas, and sci-fi novels can make it hard for that same kid to start really digging literary realism, then imagine the amount of cultural malnourishment a kid can get from having
Star Trek: The Astral Symphony
as his first album. Once I had that tape in my Walkman, I never, ever, ever had to leave a certain kind of adventure. The only thing better than watching Star Trek was listening to it.
    Like any greatest-hits album,
Star Trek: The Astral Symphony
wasn’t actually for the true fan. As a grown-up, I’m a Beatles nut and absolutely detest the idea of the “Red” and “Blue” greatest-hits albums, since they mess up the risky progression of the Beatles’ albums by only giving you the safe, popular stuff. Similarly, barely a year into playing my Star Trek album to the point of actually harming the tape itself, it dawned on me that it was a weird sampling of what this kind of music was actually all about, and I started doing some reading and buying more cassette tapes. The opening fanfare from
Star Trek V
, called “Life Isa Dream,” I learned, was actually the same opening theme Jerry Goldsmith composed for
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
. This