When did you first get interested in science fiction? Did it start with a TV show/ movie/ comic book(s)? Tell us how it evolved??
(Can you tell from the threads I start that I’m very nosy and want to get to know you all better? I love these kinds of revealing threads, so please indulge me.)
-K
You know it’s funny. I wouldn’t really say I’m a Sci Fi fan. I mean - I like things that are Scifi - but I don’t like all things scifi.
My first experience with the genre was TNG. My mom and I watched it together and I really liked it. But I never really could get into the other Star Treks
Then came the first time I saw Star Wars.
And then I guess the next show I really liked that was scifi-esque was Roswell on the WB - thought that was equal parts (if not 3/4) teen drama.
After that Firefly and then BSG.
I am afraid my Sci-fi history is fairly standard given my age.
I saw Star Wars in the theatre in NYC with my mother and younger sister who insisted on running up and down the aisles screaming, “R2D2! R2D2!” everytime the droid appeared.
I went on to become a Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers fan. With the new decade scifi was few and far between besides the occasional Star Wars installment. I also recall seeing “The Ice Pirates” in the theatre, but I only share that fact with friends. I also began watching the Star Trek movies, but surprisingly never got into the original show. Terminator and Aliens totally captivated me.
Come high school brought Star Trek TNG which I loved completely. I started watching Deep Space Nine but it never really hooked me and Voyager just seemed like a waste of time. I watched the occasional episode, but that was about it. Besides the occasional scifi movie (T2 early nineties, Stargate and various Star Trek TNG movies mid nineties, Matrix late nineties) the 90s didn’t see much scifi interest from me. I started watching Stargate SG-1, but after about a season it just seemed redundant.
The new millenia brought Star Trek Enterprise, which I loved (go ahead, take your best shot…this was a quality show). I refuse to acknowledge the Star Wars prequels as anything but a terrible, horrible mistake with the occasional interesting effect.
That brings us right up to our new Battlestar. I still remember seeing the poster on a phone booth in the City and just stopping in my tracks. “Woah” I thought, “This looks awesome.” I became a regular on the Sciffy boards and at the end of the first season saw a thread that would eventually bring me to my true love. The thread title read,
“Battlestar season is over…go see Serenity!”
I skimmed the thread not really interested. Some cancelled show got a movie, whoopee. A few days later I saw a commercial for the movie and it gave me a headache. Jumble of images that didn’t make sense, people yelling at each other, ships flying around…whatever.
A few weeks later people on the boards were persistent and, given that BSG was over, there was nothing worthwhile on to watch and there was a Firefly marathon on Scifi told my Tivo to record the lot.
I was blown away. This is what science fiction was supposed to be. Intelligent, funny, dramatic, interesting with a focus on people, not technology. I watched the series twice and then went the DVDs and watched them again with the commentary.
On November 5th, 2005 I went and saw Serenity in the theatre after work. On the way home I wrote this: My thoughts on Serenity
Which I reposted in the About Firefly Re-watch thread.
That pretty much sums up my trip from there to here. 
TOS when I was about four. Never looked back.
Makes sense; RDM doesn’t think of himself as a Sci-Fi writer.
Know exactly what you mean. I don’t like a particular genre of music either, I just like good music.
When people say they like just country music or just heavy metal, I wonder why they limit themselves so.
There’s a LOT of bad sci-fi out there, just watch the SciFi channel for one day and you will see (not counting rasslin’ of course).
I just like good story telling, whether it is in a sci-fi setting or one of those English costume dramas (whatever that genre is called). If the story is good I will be there.
I believe they are called “Period Dramas”
I know what you mean about liking good tv and good music. Course, I also happen to have a weakness for some pretty bad tv and music as well so… :o
I was not a Sci-Fi fan and in fact was kinda anti Sci-Fi. But that was my parents fault. They labeled things in 2 categories Stuff we like and and Craaaap. (My Dad says it like Tigh too.) But we watched BSG OS (because it ahd Lorne Green in it ), Star Wars, hell even Ice Pirates (funny movie if you haven’t seen it). We also watched Space Balls, but we did NOT watch Blade Runner, we did not watch Star Trek except for occasional reruns of the orignal with Kirk and even then to make fun of it really. I grew up like that.
I did not like 2001:ASO, I wasn’t into any of the TNG, DS9, Stargate SG1, Farscape, nothing really interested me, although I am a science nerd. I absolutely loved Buffy & Angel. I really liked Roswell as well but I didn’t realize it was Sci-Fi. But then Joss Whedon said he was starting a new show it would be a sci-fi show. I was worried. I don’t really like Sci-Fi, the silly aliens, the stupid unrealistic space battles, the fact that everyone has a FTL/HyperDrive etc. But then I watched it and loved it. But I blamed it on Joss. I refused to watch the 5th Element until years after it came out b/c it was sci-fi. I watched it and love it too. And then I realized that I loved Star Wars which is very much Sci-Fi and realized that like Adventure/Fantasy, Action, horror, Chick flick etc. they’re were ones I liked and ones I didn’t like. I realized that I read Sci-Fi type stuff. I was a huge Jules Verne fan. So now I realized that I like some Sci-Fi but only if its really good, and not so widely outside the realm of plausibility that my brain doesn’t get in the way of me enjoying the story. SO there is my little confession I was a Sci-Fi hater turned into a Sci-Fi snob. I’m getting there folks. Just give me time…
My history in sci-fi is all recorded on my blog, but don’t go there it’s filled with a bunch of embarassing narcissistic indulgences with a side order of inferiority complex. Pure dreg. (See, I didn’t put a link under don’t go there. If I did I’d be making a joke. Spell it out, why don’t ya? I’m sure if you’ve used google you can find it. Why am I mentioning it? OK STOP!!!) Anyway, I’ll try and sum up.
I don’t remember going to see Star Wars when it first came out. I think that’s something I would remember if I had. I remember playing with the toys though and reading the Storybook. Funny thing about that is, the Storybook has scenes the movie doesn’t. So for years, I swore up and down that I had seen the scene with Biggs and Luke on Tatooine. It was all in my imagination. Powerful, huh? I also remember after a blizzard playing as Han on Hoth.
My gateway drug to sci-fi was Star Trek, though. They used to play it every Friday night @ 5pm when I was a kid. It was sort of a bonding thing with my dad. It was my first love. At a young age, my favorite episode was ‘Shore Leave’. I would re-enact the scene where Kirk fought Finnegan over and over. Once I started watching Buck Rogers and Battlestar, I would re-enact those fights. I once dragged a refrigerator box off the street and made it into a viper/starfighter. I remember one time when they were showing ‘ST: The Motion Picture’ on broadcast TV and the whole family came over to watch. We did that at a friends (since they had cable) to watch ‘Close Encounters’. One Easter the whole family was over and we went to the Multiplex to see ‘Wrath of Khan’.
I had a Lego moonbase set that became the setting for all my stories. I morphed all that I had amassed into the storyline. There was Transformers, Voltron, Star Trek, Star Wars, BSG, Buck Rogers, et al. themes throughout. When I got “too old” to play with Lego anymore, I had no outlet. Fortunately I had a teacher who gave us a writing assignment that would not be graded. You could write whatever you wanted but you had to write every week. I started small and by the end of the year I had created an epic that spanned three timelines and hundreds of characters. The grammar and structure was atrocious but the teachers was amazed toot toot own horn. Well, I guess I burnt out cuz I never wrote again. Just dropped it. Quite sad. Where was I?
In the late 80s, TNG came out and I watched suspiciously. The first three seasons were suspect and I seem to miss all the gems, the first time around. One night I was up late and caught ‘Best of Both Worlds’. I was immediately hooked on this incarnation of Trek. But soon I noticed girls and other human relationships so scifi got set on the back burner. I reveled in drinking and other foolish teenage debauchery. It’s amazing how much living you can do during those years. Put mileage on me.
Once I settled down with a steady girl, and had to join the rat race, scifi crept back into my life. I had seen every episode of Trek multiple times and watched all the staples of scifi. Me girl said, “You are a frustrated writer, you should read some scifi.” I took her up on it and found Asimov’s ‘Foundation’. I dove in and read all the books in the series. What a ride!!
In the mid-90s I got a job and met a fellow geek. He turned me on to all the classic scifi literature. Together we would hatch out scifi plots. He threw DS9 watch parties. We would discuss Babylon 5 and Farscape at length. It drove our co-workers bonkers. That was a good time and I haven’t had that for a while until I found this community. I’m glad I did.
As a kid I used to watch original ST reruns after school at five p.m. My uncle was a huge fan, so I think that’s why I liked it. I loved SW when it came out and watched OS BSG too, loved it. I’ve always liked watching Sci-Fi and Fantasy better than reading them because I’m more of a visual learner and the reading part was difficult for me. I’m enjoying the comics right now to help me transition to reading more genre novels. I’m dying to start reading the SW books.
Things really exploded for me after watching the BSG mini-series two years ago. When you have kids of a certain age, you don’t get to watch a lot of your TV shows, so I missed a ton of stuff from 1993-2004. Every now and then I’d get to watch something- I loved Seaquest. Getting connected here at GWC turned me on to Firefly, comics and now I’m working on a Zoe costume for the Serenity screening this summer.
My kids are supportive and the hubby is tolerant, but would never go to a con with me, so the GWC community is my life line for all this fun.
I grew up in a sci fi house, my dad was a major sci fi freak. The house was always full of sci fi books and magazines. He must of belonged to every sci fi book club that existed. I don’t really remember when I first got into it, I was always reading it, it was always on TV, it was always everywhere. I was born into it.
I was 5 months old when original Trek premiered, and I don’t remember a time I didn’t know the enterprise crew. we were very excited at my house when ST: The Animated Series came along, cause, well, new Trek. saturdays during my preteen years were spent with reruns of Trek, Lost in Space, The Outer Limits, and the like. I was a few weeks late to the big party in ‘77 because I thought Star Wars could never compare to Trek. I changed my tune. ditched school and crammed a load of friends into my parents’ car to see the first showing of Jedi at my local theater in '83. from there it was original BSG, Buck Rogers, Trek flicks, & the like. David Gerrold books, James Blish adaptations of Trek eps, Ender’s Game, the odd Star Wars novel
I was also skeptical about TNG when it came along–it was really sketchy there at the beginning–but I came around on that one too. Watched every Trek incarnation. (I don’t share Solai’s enthusiasm for Enterprise. I watched every week hoping it would get better, but mostly it didn’t.) liked the Star Wars prequels well enough. don’t compare to IV-VI for reasons that have been enumerated elsewhere. Beyond Trek & Star Wars, I wasn’t what you’d call “devoted” to anything until I broke down and watched (and I know it wasn’t sci-fi, but it’s the reason I even looked at Firefly) the silliest-titled show I’d ever heard of: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I quickly fell into the cult of Joss. & in the vacuum left by Buffy, Angel, and Firefly, I found BSG. and now, thanks to you fine people, I’m contemplating attending my first con.
I think it started because my dad used to run out of stories to tell me when I would ask for them, so he’d tell me the story of Star Wars. I thought it was just something awesome that he had made up until I was about five! As mentioned earlier tonight, I was about 8 when I started watching TNG (this was in the early 90s, and involved lots of 3-5 p.m. rerun blocks, and then finally being allowed to stay up to watch new ones in the last 1.5 seasons. I also liked reruns of OS Star Trek. For some reason my mom let me buy a model kit of the Enterprise, which pretty much branded me as a geek forever, so it’s a damn good thing that I was ok with that.
One particularly good scifi in my life story: as a HS freshman I went on a date with someone I’d been crushing on for months- to see Phantom Menace. When I told my best friend that’s what I did on my big date, she replied, “That is going to just set the tone for this whole thing, you know. Star Wars? Ugh.” I did not care, and this kid turned out to be my first love and all that junk. We liked Star Wars, Douglas Adams, and Ray Bradbury together- what more did I need, right? So three years later, we were outgrowing each other and I was getting ready to away to college, and I was getting my little heart broken for the first time, and we went on one last date before breaking up: Attack of the Clones. Best friend was right!
My first experience with sci-fi was when I was barely old enough to remember. My dad’s always been a huge star-trek fan, so I’d watch TNG a lot with him. I played with lego a lot and I remember making a lego star-ship enterprise out of nothing but the coloured bricks. It looked nothing like the enterprise, but vaguely resembled it in shape lol.
Growing up, my cousin and I played with action figures a lot, and we ended up making a whole sci-fi storyline to accompany them. We called them the “colonies” (had nothing to do with battlestar… I hadn’t even heard of it at the time) and they were basically a big evil empire that took over lots of planets, but one day they were almost completely wiped out, and the survivors had a change of heart and sought to right their wrongs by becoming a band of benevolent mercenaries. Lots of fun plot-arcs came out of that, and it’s unfortunate that none of it ever ended up on paper.
When starwars: episode 1 came out, I watched the older trillogy and I enjoyed that a lot. I also got heavily into voyager when I was around 13. I also watched this show called Big Wolf on Campus, and I loved Dark Angel. I never really got into stargate though, and I can’t stand andromeda.
I honestly never knew anything about battlestar galactica until my friend showed me the miniseries last december. I fell in love with it, and downloaded seasons 1-3, and got through them in a couple of months. When I first saw the season 3 finale, I just sat there alone with my jaw hanging open for about ten minutes, taking it all in.
EDIT: I almost forgot to mention Quantum Leap and Tru Calling, as well as Back to the Future. Time travel sci-fi stuff is my favourite, and the concept behind quantum leap was particularily awesome as well.
That was pretty much exactly my time frame, too. 8 years old and watching TNG in the early 90s.
But I had had some scifi experiences before that, my dad has always been a huge scifi fan and got me started on this genre. I think my first conscious scifi memory involves watching Star Wars reruns. We still have those taped on VHS and showed them to my little brother recently. I’m refusing to buy the Star Wars DVDs since you can’t get the original movies anymore. I mean, without the added CGI stuff.
My scifi life story is pretty straightforward, involving first and foremost Star Trek and many classic scifi novels.
One particular specialty on my scifi diet was Perry Rhodan. I created a thread about PR in the book selection forum, it’s (and I’m quoting wiki here) “the world’s most prolific SF series” and if there’s anything that non-German scifi fans will ever miss out on because of the language barrier, it’s Perry Rhodan. But there is hope yet, the Lemuria cycle has been translated into English and if anyone is willing to give foreign scifi a shot, it’s totally worth it.
Here’s the link for Lemuria I on amazon.com
Subtlety, thy name is frakkintalos.
Oh man I totally forgot about Quantum Leap. I loved that show. My mom and I were addicted. Good times.
Some of you guys make me feel old. 
From the time I could read I was into sci-fi. Some of my earliest memories were Clarke, Asimov, Bradbury, Heinlein, Verne, Wells. The classics. All while still at primary school.
And to go with the sci-fi, Clarke and Asimov in particular wrote lots of hard science. I guess this grounding always gave me a critical eye when it came to viewing sci-fi on the big and small screens.
The cheesy 50’s monster/sci-fi movies left me cold (and still do despite them seeming to be rather cool to many people now).
2001: A Space Odyssey was definitive, the standard against which I have measured every sci-fi film or TV show since.
Star Wars I regarded as a western in space, pretty much how I first viewed Trek. (I only saw Trek a decade or more after first release. No cable in Aust in those days.)
I have seen very few good quality sci-fi big screen movies in recent years. Close Encounters, Blade Runner, Gattaca, Sunshine stand out perhaps.
On TV, British sci-fi dominated: Dr Who (silly, but fun), Blake’s Seven (cheap, but that whole dominatrix-Servalan-thing…grrrrr…), UFO (outstanding), Space 1999 (craaaaap, but the chicks were hot), Omega Factor (real scary, proto-X-Files), and later Hitchhiker’s Guide, Red Dwarf.
The earlier US-created series were excruciating: Lost in Space (No damn kids, OK?), Buck Rogers (no cute robots, OK?), Battlestar Galactica (appalling - no cute robots or kids, OK?), Six Million Dollar Man.
But higher production values and better stories came around with the Treks, X-Files, Babylon 5, Whedon’s stuff.
BSG pretty much stands out. The characters are more real, the ‘sci-fi’ elements pushed further into the background. In X-Files what mattered was not aliens or government conspiracies, or paranormal stuff, but Mulder and Scully, and their characters and reactions. In BSG, it is Tigh, it is Tyrol, Roslin, and so many others. Love them, hate them, care for them. I see BSG as carrying on the ‘story arc’ concept from B5, but creating more real, more human characters.
Watching Star Trek TOS with my mom, and going with my older brother to see the original theatrical release of “Return of the Jedi.”
Then later in life, Enders Game and Starship Troopers (book, not the movie) pulled me back in.
Oooh Ender’s Game!!!
This thread is a great idea, and I’d love to do it justice–but I’m having one of those multiple deadline weeks, where I can’t spare the time.
So for now I’ll just give this fake one:
I am a being from the far future who lives backward through time, so all this “sci fi” as you call it, is like historical fiction to me.
My name is Thot F. Guy, and that’s the man I’ll be until I’m born.