The First Time You Read a given Favorite Writer You were...... You Fill In The Rest

[K. Riehl]

On this thread back in 2015 I wrote about Zelazny influencing me as teenager. When I read Lois Bujold in my 20's I was equally captivated. Smart characters throughout, action, perseverance, humanity under a microscope. And some of the best quotes in SF&F such as:

The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present — they are real. –Bujold

The Bujold Nexus - Quotations

Random quotations from the books of Lois McMaster Bujold, award winning SF and fantasy author.

www.dendarii.com

 

[Peppa]

Read the Chronicles of Corum when I was 12. It was so different from Tolkien, Lloyd Alexander, and Richard Adams. Darker, more fantastic. Tragic and weird and lurid. I probably read 20 Michael Moorcock novels over the next few years, including mind-bending stuff like the Golden Barge, The Dancers at the End of Time, and the Cornelius Chronicles. The contemporary fantasy of the day - David Eddings and Terry Brooks - seemed thin gruel in comparison.

Moorcock established my personal benchmark of 'normal' for fantasy, which has left me alienated from the mainstream of the genre ever since. When his books were republished in the 90s under a Dark Fantasy imprint, I realized the Eternal Champion, Corum, Elric, Hawkmoon, and Gloriana were not regarded as normal at all.

I read this book when I was 10. Michael Moorcock was a really great writer and this book is really memorable. But it was clearly too dark a fantasy for a girl of that age and it gave me some nightmares.

But of course my childhood impressions do not detract from the merits of the book.

 

[Peppa]

People here remember reading Dune for the first time when they were 15, 14 and 12 years old. Frank Herbert is not my most favourite author, but since this thread is turning into something like "Children and Dune", I thought I'd write something.

My father loved reading science fiction and fantasy books. So our house was full of them. One day, when I was 9, I found the first three books in the 'Dune' series and started reading them. At first I thought it was a children's book (because Paul was only 15 at the beginning of the first book), but then the content of these books started to seem more and more complex to me.

Still, there were some things in these books that I found really interesting. For example, people being able to remember the past of their ancestors. The litany against fear and the story of Gom Jabbar were very helpful to me because as a child I used to cry whenever my parents talked about me going to the doctor and getting injections. One of my favorite characters was Alia, and now I really regret that there was so little of her in the two new films.

A few years later I reread the first three books and finished the rest, and enjoyed them too. But I still find the first three books interesting.

 

[BeFrank]

I was in the sixth grade and it was a textbook for my oldest brother who was in high school. It was a strictly SF short story collection that contained many classics like "A Sound of Thunder" and other classics (I'm always on the hunt for that particular collection). It wasn't the earliest memory I have of reading and I was never exclusively into SF, but that collection always comes to mind when I think about the type of stories I want to write.