Gateway books: What were the first books that began your love of SF?

[CupofJoe]

SF short stories in either Look and Learn or Speed & Power...

 

[Swank]

:WOW:

What'd I do?

 

[Astro Pen]

The Silver Locusts (titled The Martian Chronicles in the US) Bradbury, and Pebble in the Sky Azimov.
Then The Illustrated Man and The Caves of Steel

They were followed by a quantum leap to Ballard's "The Drowned World" which blew my young mind with its literary style.

 

[Extollager]

I've mentioned Gallant and Polgreen's Exploring the Planets for the paintings -- I doubt that I read the book. The paintings of R. Zallinger in one or more Golden Books, from his Peabody Museum mural, also fascinated me.

But as for science fiction early in my experience:

Perhaps two or three of the Winston juveniles -- certainly Wollheim's Secret of the Ninth Planet, with its eerie and intriguing opening in the Andes
Silverberg's juveniles, Time of the Great Freeze and Conquerors from the Darkness
perhaps a couple of Lester del Rey juveniles -- Outpost of Jupiter and The Runaway Robot

It was a Whitman Classic edition of Wells's The War of the Worlds, bought when I was 11 years old, that I regard as the foundation of my personal library. I wrote a "biography" of my personal library here:

https://efanzines.com/PortableStorage/PortableStorage-07.pdf

 

[Parson]

What'd I do?

I was reacting to this.

But I was heavily influenced by the art and music of 2001 that I listened to since I was three, Star Wars at five and BSG a few years later. I was a SF fan before I could read.

Being "heavily influenced by the art and music of 2001 when you were three? --- Wow!
"I was a SF fan before I could read." --- Double wow.

But your reaction reminded me I was an old man. I was in my middle teens before I saw any SF on the television (we only had one TV and at best three channels) and I never went to the movies before I was nearly 17 years old. So maybe what you point out wouldn't have seemed so strange to me if I had been more more recently.

 

[Swank]

I was reacting to this.


Being "heavily influenced by the art and music of 2001 when you were three? --- Wow!
"I was a SF fan before I could read." --- Double wow.

But your reaction reminded me I was an old man. I was in my middle teens before I saw any SF on the television (we only had one TV and at best three channels) and I never went to the movies before I was nearly 17 years old. So maybe what you point out wouldn't have seemed so strange to me if I had been more more recently.

When I was three we got the 2001 soundtrack. It was the deluxe type, with several pages of movie images and that truly evocative soundtrack. The images and sounds were mesmerizing. Everything so crisp and designed. By contrast, the real world was ugly and dirty looking (this was 1974, after all). To this day I don't think I've seen a "prettier" space suit. Not surprisingly, the SF films that stick with me the most are full of great design - SW, Tron, BR, Alien. They look like the future.

I forgot that I also got one of those Stephen Caldwell books when I was 8. A SF short story linking together iconic SF cover art paintings. My SF childhood was very visual.

Another pretty spacesuit.

 

[Oligonicella]

Good gods.... It was the age of pulp anthologies, so hundreds of shorts and paperbacks of every variety from every major and secondary author you can think of and dozens more that no one remembers. Those and technical fiction and fantasy reaching back to Hercules de Bergerac and more.

 

[Parson]

@Swank .... funny, I hardly remember any of the music of 2001, just that symphonic number played while showing the obelisk. Outside of Hal, my clearest memory of the movie was thinking it was super weird, so much so I didn't understand it all. A year or two later I began to think it was someone's drugged up dream. It's only been in the last third of my life that I've begun to understand some of symbolism at play.

 

[Swank]

@Swank .... funny, I hardly remember any of the music of 2001, just that symphonic number played while showing the obelisk. Outside of Hal, my clearest memory of the movie was thinking it was super weird, so much so I didn't understand it all. A year or two later I began to think it was someone's drugged up dream. It's only been in the last third of my life that I've begun to understand some of symbolism at play.

Aside from the bone/satellite symbolism, I missed anything necessarily greater. I am a huge fan of Kubrick and it always seems like he's saying what is on the screen. What were you thinking?

 

[BAYLOR]

Aside from the bone/satellite symbolism, I missed anything necessarily greater. I am a huge fan of Kubrick and it always seems like he's saying what is on the screen. What were you thinking?

If any film can be said too had a a more influences on science Fiction, 2001 A Space Odyssey would be that film. The visuals , the production, the effects , the story everything looks like no science fiction film before it or after it .

 

[Parson]

Aside from the bone/satellite symbolism, I missed anything necessarily greater. I am a huge fan of Kubrick and it always seems like he's saying what is on the screen. What were you thinking?

I didn't understand the relevance and the correlation of the three different settings. It just seemed disjointed and unrelated. I'd have likely done better if I'd read the book before the watching the movie.

 

[Swank]

I didn't understand the relevance and the correlation of the three different settings. It just seemed disjointed and unrelated. I'd have likely done better if I'd read the book before the watching the movie.

1. Alien object shows up, alters humanity's course by making us tool users.
2. Humans make it to the moon, where the aliens left another object that will send an obvious signal to Jupiter when we are capable of extensive spaceflight.
3. Humans follow the signal to Jupiter, where the surviving human is altered into something new, changing the course of humanity again.

 

[Extollager]

1. Alien object shows up, alters humanity's course by making us tool users.
2. Humans make it to the moon, where the aliens left another object that will send an obvious signal to Jupiter when we are capable of extensive spaceflight.
3. Humans follow the signal to Jupiter, where the surviving human is altered into something new, changing the course of humanity again.

Wake me up when the Star Child finds a monolith. ; )

 

[pogopossum]

I enjoyed (suffered?) from being the kid in a family where my father and older siblings all read SF. Therefore there was always stuff laying around. . I remember picking up Adventures in Time and Space - Healy & McComas and reading the entire thing over the next month. It was shelved in our TV room. We also were regular library visitors, so I had full access to writers at beyond the level of my callow (but advanced for my age) reading abilities I remember remember getting the Lucky Starr series written by Asimov under a pseudonym (French?) for kids. Also Andre Norton and Heinlein juveniles, We had a segregated library, so I had to dash into the (Jr. High) section to grab the Heinleins. . At home I also remember picking up ACE doubles that were sitting around, including something by Phil Dick - and not being able to follow it. Picked it up years later and I saw why. Raided my ten years older brother's SF collection while he was away at boarding school. He had every Galaxy mag published up to that time - and reading the Caves of Steel and a lot of other stuff I wasn't all that advanced. Also read Hardy Boys and Enid Blyton.

 

[Randy M.]

1. Alien object shows up, alters humanity's course by making us tool users.
2. Humans make it to the moon, where the aliens left another object that will send an obvious signal to Jupiter when we are capable of extensive spaceflight.
3. Humans follow the signal to Jupiter, where the surviving human is altered into something new, changing the course of humanity again.

I've only watched it once from beginning to end and did not pick up on that. Should have. (I recall whispering to the friend I saw it with that our radar mustn't be very good not to have noticed sooner that a giant baby was orbiting the planet.)

Seriously, I could have used your summation on first watching it. Aside from that, it's still one of the two or three most visually striking movies I've ever seen.

 

[Parson]

1. Alien object shows up, alters humanity's course by making us tool users.
2. Humans make it to the moon, where the aliens left another object that will send an obvious signal to Jupiter when we are capable of extensive spaceflight.
3. Humans follow the signal to Jupiter, where the surviving human is altered into something new, changing the course of humanity again.

I also did not pick up on that on my one and only viewing. I remember thinking at the time that it was three short stories which seemed related but the causality of the object and the human reaction escaped me entirely. I was of the opinion at the time that it was a kind of alien "watcher" who was charting human progress. I'd bet that if I'd had your summary I would have enjoyed the movie much more.

--- I wonder if I saw such a movie today without any preparation whether I'd pick up on this, or would I still see three stories with only the tiniest of a thread of continuity. It wa definitely visually stunning, but I think as a story it was nowhere near what it should have been.

 

[Yammerhant]

Back in 1975 while on holiday in Scandinavia at a very early age (barely double figures) I somehow managed to acquire a copy of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume IIB. This was billed as "The Greatest Science Fiction Novellas of All Time" and what a great lineup it had:

• "The Martian Way" by Isaac Asimov
• "Earthman, Come Home" by James Blish
• "Rogue Moon" by Algis Budrys
• "The Spectre General" by Theodore Cogswell
• "The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster
• "The Midas Plague" by Frederik Pohl
• "The Witches of Karres" by James H. Schmitz
• "E for Effort" by T.L. Sherred
• "In Hiding" by Wilmar H. Shiras
• "The Big Front Yard" by Clifford D. Simak
• "The Moon Moth" by Jack Vance

It was quite a fat paperback and let me tell you, I read that book to death - it literally fell apart and had to be reassembled with sticky tape.

 

[ablackenedrose]

Definitely Tunnel in the Sky, one of Heinlein's juveniles. It was this book specifically because I hadn't really enjoyed reading before this, but I needed a book to do a report on fifth grade. I was struggling to find one that met the requirements (I think it was page count) that seemed interesting, and when I asked my father for some help finding something to do the report on, he took me to the family library (basically just eight or nine floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in the living room) and handed me a few sci-fi novels. I think I picked Tunnel in the Sky because it sounded like the name of a song I liked.

Anyway, I started through it and was slogging at first, but by the end I was staying up late to keep reading because I wanted to know what happened next. Finished the book, blazed through the report and found myself wanting another adventure, and soon enough I was reading the rest of the pile of books my father had shown me and still being left hungry for more when I was done. Luckily, eight or nine floor-to-ceiling bookshelves holds a lot of books, and much of the rest of my childhood was spent on the couch with a novel from those shelves in my hands. Still haven't stopped reading to this day (apart from a four year pause when I was in university for simple lack of spare time).

 

[tinkerdan]

Here in the US--

I started with Dr. Suess in Kindergarten and first grade and somewhere between first and second grade(because teacher was worried about my reading level when my library history showed mostly checking out all the Dr. Suess that I could find)I checked out Eleanor Cameron's Mushroom Planet series.

Then my dad picked up a bunch of books from an auction and I found(But not before he introduced us to the movie Angry Red Planet

) Murray Leinsters Monsters inc

and Poul Andersons After Doomsday

Then I discovered Armageddon 2419

And then ERB

and Otis Adelbert Kline

 

[Rodders]

Oh. I'd like to add the work of Edmund Cooper to my gateway list. I was introduced to him when i was about 15. Starting with "A Far Sunset" and i read as much as i could find. I adored his books. Some wonderful Chris Foss covers, too.