At 9 I saw my older brother watching the movie Dune. I asked him what it was about but when he tried to explain it, it was too complicated for me to understand. So he grabbed his copy of the novel and said after you read it we can watch the movie again and you’ll understand. I’ve been hooked ever since.
Still havent read Dune :o
Someday you’ll watch the Sci Fi Movie “Children of Dune” and you’ll see my avatar and you’ll say “Oh my gods, that’s Thot!!”
This is tough.
-The first SciFi short story I remember reading was Bradbury’s “There shall come soft rain”.
-After that I remember going to the library and picking up some year’s best SciFi annuals that were edited by Asimov.
-Then regrettably, came the oft-mocked novelization of Star Wars by Lucas himself, but that doesn’t count because it was an adaptation.
-So then came the golden days of The Science Fiction Book Club, where the first book I got still probably shouldn’t count: “Han Solo at Star’s End” by Daley.
-Then, in the same vein came a couple Stainless Steel Rat books by Harrison, which are still kinda too goofy for me to want to call them my first hard-core SciFi novel.
-Which leaves my 44-year-old memory of Jr. High wondering if it was Ringworld or the Foundation trilogy next. I think Niven, but I’m not sure.
Awe heck, I’m calling it. Ringworld it was.
Wow, that was ages ago, I must have been like 9 or 10 or so. I think it was a compilation of Star Trek novels, like three books in one volume, it was very thick and had Spock and Kirk on the cover. Actually, those were the novelizations of the original Star Trek series. Huge impact on me. I “read” the series before I got to see it on TV.
Good Question!
One of my first Memories was the day I found out that Star Trek TOS was cancelled.(i was four) My older brother (he was 14) had to explain what cancelled meant… I was very upset, he gave me a “New stories from Twilight Zone” by Rod Serling, and said, “Learn how to read, and you won’t have to depend on the TV anymore.” Great advise… As I learned to read, I kept going back to that book, until I knew enough to be able to understand it…, and I still have that book.
so basicly I learned to read by reading Scifi and my Mind has been open ever since.
…and, “That’s the guy from Firefly!”
Yup. I can’t watch Firefly now without thinking. “Wow, that Nathan Fillion does an awesome acting job portraying Solai!”
And to further date myself, the 3rd one I read is the now largely forgotten “A Fall of Moondust” by Arthur C. Clarke.
GR is my hero. Can you get any cooler?
No, no. Step aside, you little pink Bunny. GR is MY hero, not yours.
The time machine by HG Wells, I remember i had just seen the 1960 film on TV and I wanted to know were all this had come from.
Remembered another very early one, “The Gods Themselves” by Asimov. Given to me by an uncle with a sizeable SF collection, it featured aliens with a weird trinary reproductive cycle. Oddly gripping reading.
When I got Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials years later, I was surprised to see a Soft One included.
I think it was the Hitchhiker’s Guide books, which I got into 'cuz my pops was into them. I liked them mostly 'cuz they were funny, not so much due to the sci-fi setting. I would have been, geez, 11 or 12, maybe.
(Much like I initially listened to Zappa cuz he was hysterical, and all the amazing musical stuff went over my head while I snickered at song titles like "Why Does It Hurt When I Pee?)
But I’d grown up on the Star Wars films as they came out, so they’d already made sci-fi part of my mental landcape. So the two-heads, pangalactic spaceship stuff wasn’t that remarkable in itself.
I think the HHG books further cemented that effect: I just took it for granted that space ships and lasers and aliens could be part of serious, quality fiction. I’ve always liked sci-fi – and loved some of it – but never embraced it as its own distinct genre (though it clearly is) to subscribe to. Unlike, say, the way that I look at comic books. (Out of respect to the form, I generally refuse to call comic books “graphic novels,” cuz there’s nothing wrong with comic books.) In retrospect, Getting Into Comic Books was much more of lifestyle choice than my relationship with sci-fi.
HHG, if I’m reflecting and recollecting correctly, also cemented my affinity for dry, British-style humor. Which I was predisposed to to, I guess, through a sliver of English blood and my dad exposing me to Monty Python as a kid.
Dad was also a medievalist and Tolkein fan from way back, so I was primed for fantasy stuff as well. Looking back, Dad was pretty cool. Sure, he was wrong about Planet of the Apes being crap. But he said it with such conviction that I could tell it must be worth looking into.
I think the first book that I got specifically because of its sci-fi cover art was Battlefield Earth, which is very good pulp sci-fi epic. The movie didn’t do it justice. Hubbard did some quality stuff. And a lot of batshit-crazy garbage, too. But he gets a bad rap as a writer. That was a couple years later, I was maybe 13.
Blade Runner came along soon thereafter. In retrospect, that also convinced me that sci-fi was capital-A Art as worthy as any other genre.
I know this story. I learned to read by reading Superman comics. Superman was my absolute favorite super-hero. When I was very little I could only guess at the story by looking at the very colorful panels. Then one day, I think I was 6, I realized that I could recognize some words. I can still remember my excitement and wonder. I was hooked on SciFi from that moment. And I can say I have rarely in all the years since that day, not been in the midst of a SciFi novel.
Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles”
I must admit I gave up on it at first. I picked it up years later and was able to appreciate the variations on a theme and the interesting connections between the separate, self contained stories.
In this sense I wouldn’t compare it to any other science fiction book, but to James Joyce’s “Dubliners”…on Mars.
Not sure about the actual first scifi book… I know I read LOTR in 7th/8th grade… I remember reading Bradbury around that time, too (Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes)… I’m pretty sure I read the I, Robot series in high school, but not sure… I also had a lay teacher in my Catholic high school that gave us Clarke’s The Star as assigned reading, which was pretty subversive for him (being atheist now, I have fond memories of him and that story). The first scifi book where it really had an effect on me, and inspired a love of the genre, was Heinlein’s Stranger, when I was about 17/18.
I didn’t actually read Dune till I was 30… kinda late to appreciate it. Some books seems like are best read at a specific age… if you read it too early, you don’t appreciate it, cause you don’t understand it… and if you read it too late, you’ve already obtained the life experience it has to offer, so it loses its effect.