How did you get into SF reading?

[psikeyhackr]

I started reading sci-fi at age 9.

One day in 4th grade the nun came in with this stack of pamphlets and handed them out. My guess is that a salesmen from some book seller dropped them off at the school and talked the nuns into handing them out. I distinctly recall the nun saying if we wanted to order books that was fine but if we didn't that was fine too. There was NO ENCOURAGEMENT to do it.

I think there were 4 sheets with little pictures of book covers on each side and a few sentences saying what the book was about under each picture. I went through and read every one. That is when I found Star Surgeon by Alan E. Nourse. Space ships and aliens had to be weird. So I ordered it and was hooked after that. I can't recall what books I ordered right after that one but I eventually stumbled across Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein and etc. etc.

I guess after Star Wars and Star Trek and Stargate this, that and the other aliens ain't no big deal anymore. What could be interesting about sci-fi literature besides some REAL SCIENCE? That made SF interesting too since the nuns NEVER TAUGHT SCIENCE.

But with books costing $8 apiece what are grade school kids going to buy now?

psik

[NYCfan]

I started reading SF at the same age, that came after an initial obsession with the Hardy Boys, then Greek and Nordic myths, on to the Hobbit and then Heinlein and Norton juveniles plus anything by Tolkien. My parents soon decided to channel my reading into ever more challenging stuff by adopting a rule that one out of four books I checked out had to be approved by them. That first included adult SF (no, I don't mean Silverberg's sixties extracurricular efforts), history, and later litfic (East European intelligentsia parents place a huge premium on being 'cultured', I blame grad school on them). Books were both an escape for a nerdy kid, and intellectual stimulation. As a nerdy adult they continue to perform both functions.

As to how the kids can affort them - same way I did - libraries.

[psikeyhackr]

As to how the kids can affort them - same way I did - libraries.

Since I think it is criminal (or soon will be) for a grade school kid to not have a netbook there is now another solution.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18492...-h/18492-h.htm

Use the SCI to get your FI.

psi fi propagandist

[PeterWilliam]

Use the SCI to get your FI.

psi fi propagandist

Nice! (ten char)

[Evil Agent]

My Grade 11 English teacher recommended Ender's Game. I read it and loved it. Then he recommended Asimov's robot novels, which I read and enjoyed. I then read all the Foundation novels, and a few more Sci-Fi novels, before moving more towards Fantasy in general. But I'm still thankful to that teacher!

[Ropie]

Although I haven't watched Doctor Who since the early 1980s, I would probably have to put the blame squarely with the BBC for inciting me to be interested in science with that programme and Tomorrow's World, a fantastic weekly magazine programme which explored new technology (and gave demonstrations of it on live TV, which invariably went wrong). From then, it was a natural course to pick up the Doctor Who books.

I started raiding my step dad's library when I was about 10 and found such enjoyable items as Doctor Who and the Darleks and Doctor Who and the Tomb of the Cybermen. Once I'd read these I then found Rendezvous with Rama and Contact. After this I went out and bought myself Robot Dreams (an Asimov anthology) and Dayworld by Philip José Farmer, which I have very fond memories of ploughing through.

[NickeeCoco]

Since I think it is criminal (or soon will be) for a grade school kid to not have a netbook

Oh my gosh. I'm horrified at that. I honestly think kids (Grade school kids, so we're talking ages 6-13) have too many gadgets. There is no need for a ten year old to be sitting around texting. There is no need for an eleven year old to be sitting around with their own personal netbook.

I work with kids.

They have no attention span and their vocabulary is falling. They're grammar is atrocious. Their interpersonal skills are no where near where they should be. And I honestly think it's because of way too many gadgets that allow them to have instant communication.

I like gadgets just like the next person (Though, I did chuck my cell. I don't want to be accessible wherever I go. No thank you!), but I think children really don't need it.

But when did I start reading sci fi? When I was nine or ten. I was introduced to Anne McCaffrey's Pern series. Which, when I look at it, I kinda look at as more fantasy than sci-fi. But that's what got me started into it. By my early teens I was reading the golden age stuff.

[Ropie]

They're grammar is atrocious.

Ouch!
.......

[JimF]

I too got started reading SF in the 4th grade. My teacher, Mrs Martin, told us to pick a book from a shelf in the back to take home and read. I don't remember much of the selection but I assumed it was full of hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. The one book that caught my eye was the Runaway Robot by Lester Del Rey. That was it. The book I would read.

I recently bought it on ebay and reread it. It was a great shot of nostalga.

It is a juvenile Science Fiction book about a boy Paul, and his robot Rex. Paul is the son of a corporate executive living on Ganymede. It could be a lonely existence for a boy growing up on a moon of Jupiter, so keep him company Paul's father purchased a robot companion for his son. In Paul's 16th year his father is recalled to earth and the family makes plans to return, and those plans do not include Rex. Paul is heartbroken at the though of losing his lifelong companion, and Rex is not too keen on spending the rest of his existence working on a fungus farm. Highjinks ensue.

This was the very first novel (book without pictures) I had ever read. Being 9 at the time, and the prospect of 176 pages with no pictures was daunting. Very early on I was always interested in space and science fiction, and this book was about Space and Robots!


I was always very nostalgic for this book, but I was quite surprised at how my memory of the book had changed over the years. I remembered all the broad strokes, but there were whole sections that I forgot, and there were parts I had a crystal clear memory of, and others perhaps the strongest memories were of parts of the book that weren't really there. This was a really odd experience. I remember in great detail how Paul and Rex stow away on a trap freighter piloted by a lone pilot. In my memory there very detailed descriptions of how the ship functioned, and of Rex working on the exterior of the ship in deep space to repair a fin. The thing is, in the book, these two passages are barely a paragraph each, and not as highly detailed as I remember. I guess these two concepts made such a profound impression on my young mind that over the years I have expanded them.

Jim

[NickeeCoco]

Ouch!
.......

Hahahaha. Guilty!

May I say it was 'cause I was rushing out the door to work? Heh. Too funny.

[psikeyhackr]

Oh my gosh. I'm horrified at that. I honestly think kids (Grade school kids, so we're talking ages 6-13) have too many gadgets. There is no need for a ten year old to be sitting around texting. There is no need for an eleven year old to be sitting around with their own personal netbook.

It's not about the gadget. It is what is done with the gadget. Have you tried these:

http://www.shatters.net/celestia/

http://www.musescore.org/

Pupils at St Andrew's primary school in Dundee have been using RM netbooks to collaborate with students at Kilgreggen primary school in Argyll and Bute on a class project based around the book, Dark Isle, by DA Nelson.

St Andrew's class teacher Jack Laing says: "The netbooks had a fantastic motivating effect. We had one netbook per pupil and they were able to use the netbook's webcam and Glow [an education intranet service] for video-conferencing." GC

http://www.guardian.co.uk/resource/netbooks

I work with kids.

They have no attention span and their vocabulary is falling. They're grammar is atrocious. Their interpersonal skills are no where near where they should be.

It would be curious if we could put you in a time machine and send you back to about 1948. What has television and other electronic trash done to kids minds? I hate watching television with computer graphics junk flying around the screen. We are doing an uncontrolled experiment on children's neurophysiology and probably compensating for it with drugs. No one knows what the long term results will be.

Isn't that what science fiction is about?

And I honestly think it's because of way too many gadgets that allow them to have instant communication.

I like gadgets just like the next person (Though, I did chuck my cell. I don't want to be accessible wherever I go. No thank you!), but I think children really don't need it.

I like gadgets too. I built a telegraph set in 6th grade. My first computer in 1978.

We have a global problem now in deciding how to use this technology. I think that properly implemented these computers could do a better job of educating SOME children than a lot of teachers. Sci-fi books helped me short circuit some idiotic grade school teachers that were mostly a waste of time.

Plastic models helped to.

http://www.discoverthis.com/visible-v8.html

I don't think the people running our schools will figure out what to do with these computers because schools are largely designed to condition subservience to AUTHORITY.

Asimov had better vision:

http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/funtheyhad.html

Harvard flunks though:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0wk4qG2mIg

psik

[scooter13]

I had a whole class devoted to science fiction in my junior year of high school. A couple of years later, which helped push me, was after watching the movie "2001". I mentioned it to a co-worker a couple of days later saying how it was hard to understand what was going on in the beginning. He just smiled and said, "You need to read the book." So I did, and more sci-fi after.

[E_Moon]

Age 14, 9th grade, thanks to transfer from parochial school, who challenged me to try three books in the genre (a Heinlein, a Norton, and either an Asimov or Sturgeon, can't recall) before saying I didn't like SF.

I was instantly hooked. OTOH, I didn't *buy* most of the books I read (though I did spend whatever money I had on books.) I checked out books from school and town libraries, armloads of them, bicycle basketsful of them. In high school I wrote a pretentious paper ("The Effect of Science Fiction on Modern American Literature") and my English teacher wanted to know if I'd actually read all the books in the bibliography. Yes, of course. And more. By that time I had read every science fiction book in my junior high, high school, and public libraries. Back then, girls weren't supposed to like SF (and fantasy, as a genre, was barely on the scene) but quite a few of us did.

[Seli]

I am not exactly sure, probably through Verne, Asimov, Gibson.

A large part of the normal books when I grew up were historical, fantastical (closer to pipi longstocking that fantasy proper whatever that is) in nature, with the same authors moving into SF and Fantasy like works (Beckman, Biegel, Terlouw, Hartman).
Combined with an interest in science, history, etc it led to exploration into novel ideas combined with adventure. There was some pulp i read of course, as well as other adventure type books (Karl May, Maclean etc).

I think Karl May and Verne were in the same category for me at the time, but the availability of these new experiences in science fiction and fantasy were more interesting in the end than most other genres. And nowadays most of my fiction reading is in these genres.

The possibility of exploring what I like to read was possible through libraries, and the freedom my parents left me.

Probably an additional factor in my reading development were the european style comic books/graphic novels however you'd like to call them. The combination of the same factors (adventure, history, speculation) are present in classics as Asterix and Tintin, but also in the important and everpresent Suske en Wiske (Spike and Suzy) books. Probably most of the books available in the library could be classified in the SFF genre ( eg. Valérian and Laureline, Aria, Leonard, Blake and Mortimer...)

[psikeyhackr]

Here is the sci:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnEnHze9Clg

and here is the fi:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/24161...-h/24161-h.htm

psik