how it all began

[sergebroom]

I discovered science-fiction circa 1960 thru the Buck Rogers comic-strip. What about you? And what helped it grow after that? In my case, my brain-rotting... er... love affair with science-fiction fermented further with fare such as the following...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-1AMrSzN40

Comments

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

For me, it was the school library, and my father's small collection of New Worlds.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

He only had a few copies. That was most irritating after we'd moved to Jamaica and couldn't get any more. My school library had tons of more pulpish stuff.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

In desperation, did you find yourself forced to sate your hunger by nourishing yourself from those more pulpish sources, and liking it, to your eternal shame?

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

You have to go with what you have. But there was quite a bit more than Star Trek novelisations and E.E. Smith 'novels'.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

We didn't have those when I really discovered SF. Not the 'Doc' Smith novels (*), the Star Trek stuff. Hmm... Let me amend that. There was ST-related stuff, but they were the James Blish adaptations of the original episodes. I liked them, but, for some reason, I've never really been much into novels based on TV shows or movies, much as I like the latter on their own terms.

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(*) I'm not so old that I predate Smith's Lensman stories.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

I've never been much into novelisations either. I started reading SF in the late 60s, when I was moving from childhood into my teens.

[miltonthales.livejournal.com]

I had all seven or eight of the Lensman books while I was in high school; I remember that. I'm pretty sure we had some HG Wells around the house at the same time. I remember reading "Connecticut Yankee" via the old Golden Classics comics and wanting to read the unabridged version. I don't recall how I got from there to here, and my Library Thing catalog (http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?tag=science+fiction&view=Linkmeister&shelf=list&sort=title) really doesn't have as much sf as it does other tags. I've read a lot more than I own, but nothing really recent. I just got a copy of "Perdido Street Station," which is in the TBR pile and working its way toward the top.

My parents were both readers; my (10-years-younger) sister and her family, not much.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Starting in the early 1990s, I got into reading myseries, starting with Sherri Tepper when she was writing as B.J.Oliphant, but it's been years since her last. There's the Amelia Peabody series, of course. As for F/SF, these days I am increasingly reading more short fiction, from Asimov's, and from the unfairly ignored Realms of Fantasy.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

I read just a couple of the Lensman books. There were a lot of SF anthologies in my high school library (for some reason, I am remembering an after-the-holocaust story in which the world was reorganised by SF fandom (people flew on Heinliners, one country represented at the Worldcon was the North Pohl...).

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

The world reorganized by SF fandom? I shudder to think of the results.

Anthologies, for some reason, were something that my high-school library had a lot of, more than they did novels. I discovered some neat stuff that way.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

A lot of the books were donations, I gather. That would explain the anthologies.

I wish I could remember who it was by.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Your father's collection of New Worlds? Wow. Me, I'm the only person in my family who reads and who actually loves it. My literary roots though definitely lean more toward the pulpish than yours. I'm not sure that, in spite of reading Disch, Delany and Zelazny, I ever outgrew them.

[readinggeek451]

It was my older brother's newly-bought copy of Asimov's Mysteries, when I was stuck in the car with nothing else to read. I was 13.

I had been reading fantasy for manymany years at that point: kids' books from the library, my other older brother's copies of Narnia and Tolkein, etc.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Oh, goodness... Now I realize why I found my family's car trips so awfully boring. I had nothing to read. Nothing, nothing, nothing. It's only when I started going to high-school that I found myself with enough pocket money to buy my own stuff. Before high school and its quite decent library (van Vogt, anyone?), there was little in the way of books at earlier school. What about the public library? There wasn't one. Besides, if there had been one, it'd have been in the town itself, and I was living on the outskirts, way away (or what seemed like it) in the countryside, without transportation of my own. Then, I went to college, with its fabulous library, where I discovered Delany's Nova, Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar and many others, including Clarke's Childhood's End.

[tania-c.livejournal.com]

My parents were readers of Asimov, Analog, members of the SFBC, etc. SF/F is what we had around the house(s). I remember when I was 4 and they were divvying up stuff in the divorce them discussing who got which books.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Now this is strange. You're the third person to answer my question, and you're the third person to be from a family of readers. This makes me wonder where I acquired my hunger for reading, because I sure didn't get it from my family, and I was the elder kid. I remember my parents telling me that, before I started going to school, I'd just be staring in fascination at the 'funnies' section of our newspaper's Friday edition, and that was long before I knew how to read. Then, one day, after I had started going to school, I suddenly realized I could understand what the words were. The comic-strip where that happened? Buck Rogers, of course.

[tania-c.livejournal.com]

Evolution hard at work, it's the only answer that fits.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't go that far. Still... My parents came from a background with limited possibilities, but my siblings had the same educational opportunities that I had, and yet they chose not to avail themselves. Sometimes, I wonder (jokingly) if I really am genetically related to them.