One of my earliest memories is watching Star Wars on TV and thinking, “How can I get in that world?” I’m not so sure I want to be in that world any more, and I’ve been trying to figure out why.

After a very early period in preschool and kindergarten when I rejected all “boy toys” as unacceptably stereotypical for a boy like me to play with (I favored gender-neutral Snoopy toys and Legos), by first grade I was heavily into Star Wars toys—followed by an even more intense Transformers period. My career aspiration was to be a continuity expert (I didn’t know that term, but I figured that job had to exist) for Hasbro, helping them keep all the Transformers toys and merchandise consistent with the Transformers’ master narrative of exodus from Cybertron.

When I was in junior high, my uncle Jeff turned me on to Isaac Asimov, and then when I visited the Air & Space Museum in Washington, I spent the last wad of my souvenir-buying cash on an encyclopedia of Science Fiction. It was on.

During high school, I raced through almost every word of science fiction Asimov ever wrote, then turned to the other classics like Heinlein, Del Rey, Clarke, and Wells. My proclivity for sci-fi reading was such that my dad put me on a program where every other book I read had to be taken from the family study, which largely contained the book collection of my late English-professor grandfather. I actually obeyed that rule, martyr that I am, and miserably shuffled Hawthorne, Doyle, and Capote in with the Le Guin, Herbert, and Bradbury I really wanted to read.

I rediscovered my Star Wars fandom, and mastered the rules of the official role-playing game, even though the only people who would play with me were my little sisters and their friends. (“You walk into the room and see a giant spike embedded in the ceiling!” “I use my lightsaber to cut it off and take it with me!” “Why would you do that?” “I don’t know! It might be handy!” “You’re obviously in a torture chamber!” “So?”) I stayed up late taping episodes of Star Trek, Mystery Science Theater 3000, and The Twilight Zone. I was a total sci-fi geek.

How did the dream end? In retrospect, I think it was because I tried—really, literally—to fly too close to the sun. I abandoned my aspiration to be a movie critic in favor of a dream to become an astronaut and go into space; when I realized that would almost certainly require military service, I ditched that dream and instead went into aerospace engineering. That ambition took me all the way to Boston University, where within weeks of matriculating at the College of Engineering, I realized that a career as an aerospace engineer would involve a lot less Howard-Hughes-style walking around hangers in scarves and banging on fuselages than Office-Space-style sitting in cubicles in Eagan, Minnesota, designing tail fins on missiles. So I bailed, and transferred to early childhood education because the student teachers at the lab preschool seemed to be having a lot of fun. (And, in stark contrast to the engineering students, they all seemed to be women.)

I still considered myself a sci-fi geek—I even waited for hours outside Morse Auditorium to be one of the first 50 people into a Mystery Science Theater screening and thus receive a t-shirt—but I acted the part less and less. I had one good friend who shared my Star Wars history and would play the poorly-designed Star Wars trading card game with me, and a roommate who was a Star Trek: The Next Generation fan—for all of junior year, our wall calendar showcased “Miss November” (Gates McFadden)—but fewer and fewer of my friends cared about sci-fi.

Every year that’s gone by since, I’ve had less and less to do with sci-fi. I haven’t seen either of the last two Transformers movies, and I still don’t know jack shit about Doctor Who. I’m trying to make my way through American Gods, which is the first thing by Neil Gaiman I’ve ever read. I tried to revisit my formerly beloved Isaac Asimov, but I couldn’t handle the wooden characters and awkward dialogue. I know there’s a lot of much better-written sci-fi out there, but I just can’t bring myself to choose it over Philip Roth or Marilynne Robinson. Comic books? I know nothing.

I shouldn’t need to feel guilty about this—but I do. I often encounter sci-fi geeks who are still proudly practicing, and they tell me I need to go to Cons with them, or get the Reddit app, or join a comics-trading circle, or go to midnight screenings of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. There’s still a part of me that thinks this all sounds great—the part of me that popped up the other night to clarify a technical point regarding Asimov’s future history that I was shocked to find I still remembered—but I never actually do it.

I can’t summon the interest I once did in alternate universes, because these days I’m more interested in figuring out the real world that seemed so inadequate for so long. I’ve changed, and in the process I’ve forsaken the tribe of sci-fi geeks that sheltered and embraced me in my youth. Sorry, wizards: I’ve turned in my wand and become a simple Muggle.

– Jay Gabler

Photo: On a recent episode of Freaky Deeky, the author finds that space can be a lonely place.