Your earliest sci-fi memory...

[Jo Zebedee]

A Blake’s 7 episode. Cally on a windswept planet. I suspect the episode was Terminal.

 

[Orcadian]

Well, one hates to date oneself, but I was a psychotic fan of Fireball XL-5 as a (very!) young child. It was the first show I ever declared to be "my show," and I had to watch it. (There was an elaborate TV watching ritual I won't go into here.) Rockets, romance, robots… today's science fiction could take a page from that book, I can tell you.

Well, I realise Paige Turner's post is from half a lifetime ago but (as a newbie) I have been trawling through things I've missed. So I too was a Fireball XL5 fan! One of the earliest TV series I can remember. Three crew: Steve, Venus and Brainy or Brains? Even as a 7 year old it bothered me that XL5 wobbles as she runs up the take-off ramp.

Also Space Patrol, around the same time, I think. Galasphere 347, also with three crew, names forgotten but all men. I have a strong memory of them descending into somewhere in a sort of lift. There was a tube with bubbles travelling up to show that they were moving.

 

[Orcadian]

My earliest Sci-fi memory would be a book by Andre Norton, which I do not even remember the title of. It was a story a young herder from the planet Norden, who was a herder. He had been transplanted into another star system where immigrants were only allowed to the main planet (?) if they had a job. He got a job at a pet store but soon pets who had been inhanced to the point that they were no longer pets are sent there. He finds he can speak with them telepathically. And so on. If anyone recognized this and can tell me the name of the book I would appreciate it a lot.

Thinking this might be Catseye, @Parson. https://www.librarything.com/work/152576. "[A] pet emporium ... imports exotic animals from across the galaxy. Horan, born a herder on the lost world of Norden, has an [special] affinity for animals. [The owner spots this] and offers [him] a job."

 

[Alex The G and T]

Hmmmm.... 20 Kiloleagues under the sea, with Kirk Douglas, 1954.

Well, I wasn't born til '57; but I remember that Mom and Granny would shepherd me through the door of the cinema and bugger off for a couple hours of shopping, lunch and a couple of cocktails.

I might have been left with a playmate, or my younger brother. If Bro was motile, like age 3 or 4; that would have bumped my age up to 7 ish.

A couple of hours of babysitting for a couple of nickels. Schweet!

 

[psikeyhackr]

Well, I realise Paige Turner's post is from half a lifetime ago but (as a newbie) I have been trawling through things I've missed. So I too was a Fireball XL5 fan! One of the earliest TV series I can remember. Three crew: Steve, Venus and Brainy or Brains? Even as a 7 year old it bothered me that XL5 wobbles as she runs up the take-off ramp.

OMG!

CGI nostalgia!

 

[Valtharius]

I might be giving away my youth and inexperience here, but I literally cannot remember a time when I wasn't a Star Wars fan.

 

[THX1138]

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Star Trek, Lost in Space, Twilight Zone and The Prisoner all played throughout the week here, so I had plenty to choose from and can't remember any one being first. UFO and Space 1999 a couple of years later. Does the Jetsons count?

As for movies, the first I remember seeing was Silent Running w/Bruce Dern then the original Planet of the Apes around the same year on TV. All of the others I remember seeing after these...On TV of course. I was young then.

 

[Parson]

Thinking this might be Catseye, @Parson. Catseye by Andre Norton. "[A] pet emporium ... imports exotic animals from across the galaxy. Horan, born a herder on the lost world of Norden, has an [special] affinity for animals. [The owner spots this] and offers [him] a job."

Indeed it was Catseye. Someone recognized it years ago and I've since had a re-read. I was surprised by 3 things: first how well it held up. Second, how some of the scenes I remembered the best were not quite as I remembered them, and third, how much I didn't remember which was actually pretty important to the plot. All in all a pretty good introduction to what I would now call Science Fantasy.

 

[Quokka]

My earliest memories are definately the cartoons... with Astroboy, Battle of the Planets, Robotech and Starblazers among them.

Then the movies such as When Worlds Collide and It Came From Beneath The Sea

As for novel's my first memories are of The Tripods, The Legionary Quartet and earlier still a series called something like Earth 2 or second earth?

Wow there's a blast from the past but at least I'm consistent, I just posted in similar threads in the Book Discussion section and as I said 16 or so years ago it all started with 50s sci fi movies and a children's sci-fi book series that I still claim was called Earth Two even if I can't find mention of it .

 

[magpie Asylum]

My first real memory of Sci Fi was watching Doctor Who with my father. This was back when Doctor Who was on PBS. The Tom Baker era. It came on around eight o'clock. My father would pop popcorn and we would sit and watch these amazing stories unfold with the worst visual effects. It was one of the few times I got to spend with my father. He was always working and he was stoic to a fault. It was watching those old re-runs that I decided as a child I wanted to create stories like that.

 

[LostCosmonaut]

I might be giving away my youth and inexperience here, but I literally cannot remember a time when I wasn't a Star Wars fan.

Same here---my parents started showing me Star Trek and Star Wars before I was even old enough to know what I was looking at. I like to joke that I was raised in the faith. I still have an old painting I did in kindergarten, showing the Enterprise squaring off against the Reliant in the Mutara Nebula.

And I know that one of these doesn't count as sci-fi, but my ideas of space travel, as a very young kid, were mostly informed by the movies Apollo 13 and Armageddon. I broke the cargo doors off my toy Space Shuttle reenacting scenes from the latter.

 

[Rodders]

Ahhh, the Space Shuttle. What a wonderful future that spaceship gave us.

I was fortunate enough to have to travel to New York a couple of weeks ago and saw the Space Shuttle Enterprise on the deck of the USS Intrepid. Still beautiful, even now.

 

[Elckerlyc]

An TV episode (probably) of something SF. It must have been somewhere 1963 or 1964, before we had a TV at home. I watched it at a friends home. I was 11 at the time.

Scene: A guy and a girl in a train compartment, obviously disliking each other for one reason or another. A few other people in the compartment watched this with either annoyance or amusement. Suddenly persons without face emerged in the compartment. I assume they were supposed to be robots, but I wasn't familiar with that concept at the time.
The buy and girl were teleported to someplace else. Stuff happened, which I don't recollect in detail, but during all this the boy and girl managed to transform their dislike into the opposite. At the end of all this they were teleported back to the place and time from which they had been kidnapped, while embracing each other. To the amazement of the other people in the compartment, who had seen nothing but only saw them going from arguing to embracing in a split second.
The whole thing amazed me too, apparently, as I still remember it. But then TV was fairly new to me. The only thing I had ever seen on TV (at the neighbours) was Ivanhoe.

 

[johndsal]

Invisible Man and Quatermass and the Pit from the late 50s. Just a Young stripling but I can remember the bandages coming off in ‘Invisble’ and the Martians in ‘Quatermass’. Scared the c**p out of me at the time. Quite liked the ‘Quatermass’ shown in the late 70s with John Mills and the hippies. Looks dated now though.

 

[Bramandin]

I was in the theater for Return of the Jedi but I don't remember it. Probably a clip of Empire Strikes Back on the VHS or some old movie dad was watching from when nuclear disaster movies were popular. I was pretty young when I was exposed to Alien. Not Sci Fi perse, but I enjoyed shows like Connections and Beyond 2000. I'm using a mug that used to have Sea Quest printed on it, but it's glass and the paint came off.

Books that I remember... Dragonriders of Pern, HHGTTG, parents had a subscription to Analog, and Star Trek TNG novellas.

 

[CupofJoe]

I was in the theater for Return of the Jedi but I don't remember it. Probably a clip of Empire Strikes Back on the VHS or some old movie dad was watching from when nuclear disaster movies were popular. I was pretty young when I was exposed to Alien. Not Sci Fi perse, but I enjoyed shows like Connections and Beyond 2000. I'm using a mug that used to have Sea Quest printed on it, but it's glass and the paint came off.

Books that I remember... Dragonriders of Pern, HHGTTG, parents had a subscription to Analog, and Star Trek TNG novellas.

In late 1979, the older brother of a friend of mine snuck the two of us in to the local cinema to watch Alien. The film was a shock to my tender senses and the less said about the effect Sigourney Weaver had on my life the better. At least for this family friendly forum...

 

[sciwriterPark]

Day Of The Triffids by John Wyndham was the first sci-fi that I remember and it still influences me.

 

[Orcadian]

Wow there's a blast from the past but at least I'm consistent, I just posted in similar threads in the Book Discussion section and as I said 16 or so years ago it all started with 50s sci fi movies and a children's sci-fi book series that I still claim was called Earth Two even if I can't find mention of it .

@Quokka Earth 2 (TV series) - Wikipedia. Obvs this was on TV but based perhaps on the book series you recall?

 

[Orcadian]

From age 7-12, which I'd say were my impressionable years.

Memorable SF books: Return to Mars, Rocket to Limbo, Star Surgeon, Pilgrimage (Henderson), The Happy Planet (dorky title, actually good!), The Universe Between, Farmer in the Sky, Scavengers in Space, The Chrysalids.

Memorable TV series: Space Patrol, Fireball XL5, Lost in Space (the comedy element passed me by completely!), Thunderbirds. Only ever liked the first Dr Who, William Hartnell. When he died the series morphed into something else for me, and I lost interest.

Memorable SF films, mostly seen if/when they came to TV (otherwise too ££ for the parents): The Lost World, Forbidden Planet, When Worlds Collide, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The First Men in the Moon, Quatermass II - the one where something nasty is growing in the tanks of a factory. These day the special effects seem --clunky-- but back in the day suspension of disbelief was a doddle.

 

[Quokka]

@Quokka Earth 2 (TV series) - Wikipedia. Obvs this was on TV but based perhaps on the book series you recall?

It deoesn't appear to have been at least I have never been able to find it acknowledged anywhere as a possible source material. I read the books in the early 80s and I wouldn't be surprised if the book series was 70s or earlier. The plotlines sound somewhat similar but to be honest its a very hazy recollection except for the name, a cover involving two astronauts, I think on a moon-like setting but could have been a space station, and that the main characters were children or teenagers being a young adult/ children's series.