The following is an excerpt adapted from The Edumacation Book: Amazing Cocktail-Party Science to Impress Your Friends by Andy McElfresh.

Here's my misspent youth: I spent many, many hours in a camping hammock behind my parents' house devouring the Science Fiction Hall of Fame series, everything by Arthur C. Clarke, many things by Robert Heinlein, the complete works of Philip K. Dick, and especially issues of the short-lived Galileo magazine. I also read Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, which was a lot like Alfred Hitchcock's Suspense Magazine, but with ray guns and the peculiar feature of having a different photo of Isaac Asimov in the upper left corner on each issue. One photo was of Asimov's feet.

The Edumacation Book: Amazing Cocktail-Party Science to Impress Your Friends by Andy McElfresh, forward by Kevin Smith is available on March 20, 2018.

Weldon Owen Publishing

I got into sci-fi when I was a young teenager. That's when I really started pouring on the steam as a competitive swimmer and a member of a barbershop quartet, which meant I had a lot of free time to read all the way through high school while other young men were spending all those tedious hours exchanging bodily fluids and viruses with young women (or each other). I was filling my head with possible futures, then thinking about them (or singing the baritone parts to one-hundred-year-old songs) for six hours a day in the pool. I never grew taller than 5-foot-6, which ruined my chances of becoming a world-class swimmer, and I never was able to grow a handlebar moustache, which ruined my chances of becoming a professional barbershop quartet singer. (So, thank God.)

I was super into gear, and dreamed of possessing impossible inventions, like I was Miniver Cheevy longing for the Medici gold. A chronosynclastic infundibulum that you could activate under your arm, which would serve as a holster for whatever you wanted to carry and was completely undetectable to anyone in the universe? I wanted. A portal projector that would allow you to walk through any wall, could teleport you anywhere, and somehow regulated the difference in temperature and air pressure? On my wish list. A watch that you could set to go back and undo all of the embarrassing moments in your life? I still want that. In fact, if the Devil is reading this, write my publisher for my email and we can make a deal.