For me it was a book called “The Spaceship Under The Apple Tree” By Louis Slobodkin. I got it from a bookmobile as a 10 year old in the mid-sixties and it changed my life forever. A boy befriends a young alien who has a transparent spaceship and other cool examples of superscience and they travel all over the world.
I was hooked. I had to have more. I read other “Spaceship” books, and while prowling the library, I discovered Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke. I have dozens of books by these and other authors, but I have never been able to find a copy of TSUTAT.
On a similar subject, I have vauge memories of a SF story serialized in issues of “Boy’s Life” from the late 50’s-early 60’s (they were collected in my school library). They were of the adventures of a scout troop who had a boy from the future as a member. He lived in one of these single building megaloposises (?) and was bald and kind of puny. Does anyone have any info on these stories and how I can get hold of them?
As a youngster I read the Martian Tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs and I instantly became hooked (I also wanted to be John Carter for awhile too, but that is a different thread).
I was watching Tetsu-jin (Gigantor) when I was three years old. There were a lot of SF cartoons out there: Sealab 2020, Josie and the Pussy Cats in Outer Space, Space Ghost, etc., plus the teevee shows such as Time Tunnel, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Land of the Giants and Lost in Space. Oh yeah, and It’s About Time (anyone remember that one? :eek: ). I started reading Poe when I was eight years old (saw a quotation in a comic book). SF and Horror often “cross-pollenate”, so one fed off the other.
The thing about science fiction that I like the most is, it takes reality and gives it an element of the fantastic, the other-worldly, the non-mundane. I don’t remember exactly what turned me on to it at first, but I do know that Heinlein’s “Have Spaceship, Will Travel” and Alan Dean Foster’s novels had a big part of it. Even before that, the “Mushroom Planet” novels were popular with me as a kid.
Podkayne of Mars. I was looking for something else in the library, and wasn’t sure of the author of the book I was looking for. The name caught my eye. After reading it, I so wanted to be Podkayne’s kid brother (clark?).
Lyold Alexander’s High King series turned me on to fantasy, fwiw.
Not those awful “Sci-Fi” movies they showed on TV, that’s for sure!
I think I got into it because my dad was into it. I took a passing interest, and wrote some wacko tales of people from Venus on our family typewriter, but I didn’t really get “into” it until I started reading Arthur C. Clarke in my teens. That guy’s sense of verissimilitude is amazing.
However, in my later years, I started losing interest in Clarke. His characters all seem a little too “perfect” and one-dimensional. They’re never in conflict with each other. Where is the back-stabbing mission commander who’ll do anything to get to the top? Where’s the virtuous cadet who resents the commander’s treachery but dares not talk about it? Where’s the obligatory love interest that’s torn between the two of them? Where’s the token ethnic minority who’s poured his whole life into getting ready for the mission and will be damned if he’ll let little things like engine failures or mission safety get in the way? Where’s the weed-smokin’ rebellious loser who only got on the mission 'cause he’s the mission commander’s favorite nephew? Bah. All we get is a parade of Nice Guys, with all the depth and bite of a dish of oatmeal.
Yeah, Isaac Asimov suffers from a similar ailment. As does Heinlein, but in his own unique way - sure, his people can be assholes, but they’re all so chipper and witty, like oversexed Oscar Wilde characters on Prozac. I finished with all those guys by the age of 10 and moved on to Zelazny.
As for myself, I’m 26 years old, and like virtually my entire age-group, I was turned on to SF by a certain 1977 movie and its sequals.
Some of my earliest recollections were of family talking about the scare over Sputnik (I was born in 1955). The Space Race was always in the news and the future seemed wide open. Science and SF just seemed naturals for me.
I actually learned to read a bit before I learned to talk, and what got me forever hooked on SF was “Space Ranger” comics (I think that was the name)… Interstellar soldier/explorers with a little pink pudgy trumpet-mouthed alien sidekick. My mom read them to me and I learned to read from SF comics.
Jules Verne and H.G. Wells books were my staple in grade school. Literally wore the covers off Journey to the Center of the Earth and The Time Machine. By sixth grade, Isaac Asimov’s Fantastic Voyage was my intro to modern SF. Asimov and Clarke followed soon after.
I am one year younger than Star Trek, and its reruns have been on TV as long as I can remember. When I was two years old, Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, and some of my earliest memories are of the Apollo 13 crisis. So I have always been a space fan.
My first real fanboy experience was The Six Million Dollar Man. I was a 98-pound weakling, and I loved watching Steve Austin beat the tar out of bad guys.
Somewhere along the way, I read lots of the classics: Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Heinlein, Andre Norton, and whatever else the school library had in stock.
Oh, yes, and when I was ten, there was that Lucas film…
Dinosaur movies on Science Fiction Week on the Four-Thirty Movie. Also Angry Red Planet.
I discovered written SF through a book whose title I’ve forgotten that involved a stegosaur in the American southwest.
What really made it my genre of choice was Philip Jose Farmer, and alien sex. I was able to read rather graphic stuff, and no authority figure was the wiser…
I’m not that into it now, but as a kid I always watched some corny local TV show on Saturday. It was mainly selling cereal, but they had a man in a robot suit that I was never sure was real or fake.
What turned me on to science fiction? Well, it came in three waves:
Star Trek, first broadcast when I was a babe in arms, and available throughout my early childhood in reruns at 10:30 on Saturday nights.
A collection of 1970s sci-fi published by Harlequin under the name Laser Books, including a few which seemed wonderful at the time, but strike me as pretty crappy now, such as Serving in Time by Gordon Eklund, and Crash Landing on Iduna and Walls Within Walls by Arthur Tofte - actually, Walls Within Walls is still pretty good -
My first serious girlfriend, Joanna N., who introduced me to Robert A. Heinlein - from that point on, I was hooked on sci-fi (and busty blonde chicks - look me up, Babe!).
Later came the Frank Herbert, the Arthur C. Clarke, and the Niven and Pournelle - and even my brief L. Ron Hubbard period. I could go on - but that’s how it started.
Just browsing around the library and found Bester’s The Demolished Man; great stuff! It was “mystery” enough that the premise caught my interest, and his writing is so vivid I got hooked.
Then it was on to Phillip Jose Farmer, etc. I mostly dabble around.
First thing was a TV cartoon series no one’s been able to identify, about a boy whose father was kidnapped and who went in a spaceship to visit all the planets in the solar system to look for him (this was around 1960 or so). It was mostly an excuse to teach people about the facts about the planets, attaching the science lesson onto a rudimentary plot.
Later, I started reading Tom Swift, Jr., which truly got me hooked. “Tom Swift and the Visitor from Planet X” was my favorite.
I’ve been a sci-fi geek for so long it’s hard to remember. “Sci-Fi Theater”, “Creature Feature” and “The Outer Limits” stand out from my childhood (the first two were Saturday sci-fi and monster movies - all the classics). I remember reading almost anything I could get my hands on from about third grade, but “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea” and anything by Ray Bradubury got me really started at around 9 or 10. By the time that 1977 film came out, I was already firmly treading the dark path that would lead to being one of the 5% (females at a science fiction convention).
“It’s about time, it’s about space, it’s about men in the strangest place…”
