What was your first? Follow

Nueromancer.

Dragonflight by Anne McCafferty

I totally forgot the name, but it was about these Tripods that came to Earth and took kids when they turned 13 and did something that I also seem to forget.

Edit: After further research, the series is actually called The Tripods and starts with The White Mountains. And once they get to the age of 13, they get...abducted...by the Tripods and are "capped". The protagonists don't know what happens to the capped ones besides that they worship the Tripods.

Edited, Apr 2nd 2008 4:02pm by Azazel

The Never Ending Story got me into Fantasy novels also. (See my avatar).

Sweet, I didn't know there was a TV show. My young age makes me miss all the good shows . I'll have to look for it, thanks for telling me!

Science-fiction books? Hmm, haven't really read that many, I think. Unless some of the stuff by Dean R. Koontz and Stephen King counts as sci-fi. A lot of their books are futuristic apocalyptic stories about how we are dependent on technology and how it will ultimately lead to our downfall.

But if we're talking fantasy, it was definitely The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. When the trailer for the first movie about The Lord of the Rings came out, my parents asked me if I wanted to go see it once it hit the theatres. I had no clue what the story was about, but the special effects looked kind of cool. My mom went out and bought The Hobbit for me, because she couldn't believe I hadn't read it.

Two weeks later I'd read all the books and was crawling up and down the walls to get my hands on tickets to the movie.

Fun fact: For a week after having read the trilogy, which I read in six days, I spoke Olde English (well, Olde Danish since they were translated, but you know).

Edited, Apr 6th 2008 12:16pm by Mazra

Because of the small town I live in, I didn't get the chance to read much SF books. But you guys gave me plenty to read up on. But my interrest in SF begane with ST:TNG and B5.

Wheel of Time series.


Also hello to Kawinee.

I Robot. I still have my original hard copy.

"The Pawn of Prophecy" by David Eddings. I first read it when I was 17 and have faithfully reread that series 3 - 4 times a year since then.

In the 4th grade, I found a copy of Castle Roogna (Xanth novel... I now shudder) in the glovebox of a pick-up my family was borrowing. I tore through it as quickly as possible although I was only 2/3s done before we had to return the truck a day or two later. I read a bunch of other books in the fantasy genre after that although I never did finish Castle Roogna until the 8th grade when I saw it in a school library and remembered the cover.

Weeeeeeeeeelll.... I had this pop-up book about a robot in the future, when I was little. I don't remember much about the story, but I think there was a girl robot in it too.

I really don't remember much about my childhood, and I've forgotten a zillion more books than I remember. I separate out fantasy and sci-fi. Another problem is that I remember great stories, but don't remember the actual titles, or author's names. I can tell you I read the Hobbit when I was 8, (for fantasy) and Dune when I was 13 (for Sci-fi). I remember reading a lot of fantastic children's or "Young Adult" fantasy books, very early. I read Hienlein's shorter, earlier sci-fi, young. And the "I Robot" stuff. But I can't remember if that was before or after Dune. Bit I'm sure there had to have been a sci-fi book before Dune.

Oh, lord, I remember now, doing a book report when I was ten on a book that was set in a post apocalyptic world, where the hero winds up at the end of the story being the main care-taker of an artificially intelligent computer, who keeps asking him questions. I gave the book a low rating, because I found the ending really depressing, and when I was ten a sad book wasn't a good book.

Books were always just there. I don't remember a beginning... unless it's reading the Beatrix Potter and Flower Fairies books myself, without my Mother's help. Sometime in Primary School I discovered the bullies didn't inhabit the library, and I've been reading constantly ever since. My Primary school had a really good selection of fantasy and sci-fi tucked on the same shelves as all the other fiction, so I inevitably went through them all. I remember An Ordinary Princess, Which Witch, and The Land Behind the World, from Primary School. All fantasy. For science fiction there was a story about some children who discovered a small building where time moved much faster inside than outside. One of the boys locks himself inside for a year, which is only overnight for everyone else, so that he is finally different from his twin brother... a year older! In the end an alien machine retrieves the building/vessel. Another book for children I read when very young was about a slave-boy in an anti-technology agrarian society. He escapes, has adventures, and it comes out that everyone is living on a colony planet, and that the Star in the night sky that is worshipped by everyone is the far-away Sun that Earth rotates around. I forget what disaster or chain of events lead to everyone abandoning their space-faring technology.


I think it's not possible to have an unhealthy obsession with The Discworld.

What is kind of interesting to me is that (obviously) your tastes get more sophisticated as you get more mature, or more educated. When I was a young teenager, Piers Anthony, David Eddings and Anne McCaffrey blew me out of the water. I adored their books, read them multiple times. I went back to them when I was older, and realised with much dismay that I couldn't read them any more. There were a LOT of flaws. (Although there's just a couple of McCaffrey's books I can still tolerate, and I have a big soft spot for). Sort of the same for Heinlien, who is sometimes still good, and sometimes strangely awful. I'd still highly recommend all of those authors for teenagers, maybe even young adults (over 20) with not a lot of experience. But I wouldn't recommend them to any adult.


Edited, Jun 21st 2008 2:15pm by Aripyanfar

Oooo, I read those.