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What Was Your "Gateway" Book to SF, F, H
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ed.rybicki
Posted 2013-11-22 12:45 AM (#5782 - in reply to #5781)
Subject: Re: What Was Your "Gateway" Book to SF, F, H



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Hardly weird - just a normal imaginative child!  Like the rest of us...B-)
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daxxh
Posted 2013-11-25 10:02 PM (#5788 - in reply to #4846)
Subject: Re: What Was Your "Gateway" Book to SF, F, H



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Location: Great Lakes, USA		Ride a Wild Horse by Ruth Christoffer Carlsen was the first scifi book I read. I was in 4th grade and 9 years old. I was really looking for horse books. I liked it, so read Moon of Three Rings by Andre Norton. That was it for science fiction in the elementary school library. I watched the Six Million Dollar Man on tv and was determined to find Cyborg by Martin Caidin. The looks I got as a ten year old girl asking for that in the bookstore were interesting. Apparently, cyborg was not a word that was used much in rural Pennsylvania. I had to wait until 7th grade and the high school library and talked my parents into a membership at the public library (we didn't live in town, so we had to pay) before I could read more. I read When Worlds Collide, The Cybernetic Brains, The Hand of Zei, Voyage to Arcturus, lots of Asimov and Anderson and that was pretty much it for science fiction in those libraries. I ended up buying a lot of books, which I still have.
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htaccess
Posted 2013-12-17 2:07 AM (#5848 - in reply to #4846)
Subject: Re: What Was Your "Gateway" Book to SF, F, H



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It was "Sailor on the Seas of Fate" by Moorcock, the cover was so interesting I decided to see what it was about. A friend of my dads had left it at our house, he let me keep it. It got me hooked on Moorcock who was a huge influence on me.
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Emil
Posted 2013-12-18 1:08 PM (#5852 - in reply to #5848)
Subject: Re: What Was Your "Gateway" Book to SF, F, H



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Location: Grootfontein, Namibia		For me it was a short story "A Meeting with Medusa".
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tenlegdragon
Posted 2014-09-01 3:34 PM (#8402 - in reply to #4846)
Subject: Re: What Was Your "Gateway" Book to SF, F, H



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Sci-Fi would be one of the Dunes, the one where young Jessica met Paul.

Horror would be Needful Things by Stephen King

Fantasy is hard to put my finger on, because I don't want to say stuff like Alice in Wonderland, Narnia, Wizard of Oz and these things that you're more or less expected to read when you're young or in school... I want to say it was one of the Pern books. Borrowed it from a library and kept it for two months reading it over and over. It had weird binding and a twine bookmark thingie...Can't remember which Pern, but that was when I started to get a taste for the fantasy genre and say, "You know what, I think I'm into this. Sorry mum, but no more Dickens for me!"

Pern was the gateway drug, Dune was after when I started mixing it up to experiment and Stephen King fed the habit when I already knew how to work the tourniquet. I broke out kinda late, thanks to my mum who wanted to have discussions about Miss Havisham and the Mayor of Casterbridge and these people. I had been falsely led to believe that Mr Darcy was the coolest hero on earth.

:-(

And now at the end I'm wandering about War of the Worlds... It wasn't really the gateway, but it was probably my first hit of the good stuff. That's what, Science Fantasy, kinda?
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Badseedgirl
Posted 2014-09-01 11:53 PM (#8405 - in reply to #8402)
Subject: Re: What Was Your "Gateway" Book to SF, F, H



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tenlegdragon - 2014-09-01 3:34 PM
And now at the end I'm wandering about War of the Worlds... It wasn't really the gateway, but it was probably my first hit of the good stuff. That's what, Science Fantasy, kinda?


The point is that most of the time your first book in retrospect is not good, but it is the one that caught you eye for some reason. None of my gateways were all that good, but they made me want to read more!
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brittishice
Posted 2014-11-26 5:49 PM (#8937 - in reply to #4846)
Subject: Re: What Was Your "Gateway" Book to SF, F, H



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Goodness, I'm not sure. I have memories, but I'll try.

I started off in SF when I was probably around 10 years of age or so. I had just finished the infamous Hardy Boys, and I was looking for a new series to read in the library. I stumbled on the Tom Swift books (Series three) and read a couple of them. The series was incomplete in the library, so I wandered around and found Red Mars. That was probably the beginning of the end, so to speak.

For Horror, it branched out from my SF reading. That had lead into horror film, as SF and horror are often shown on the same channels. I started off in Horror with the works of Max Brooks.

Fantasy is still a genre that I have not done much within. So far, I have just read the J.R.R. Tolkien works: Silmarillion, Hobbit, LOTR.
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Doctordune1972
Posted 2015-01-30 2:21 PM (#9408 - in reply to #4846)
Subject: Re: What Was Your "Gateway" Book to SF, F, H



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Oh for me my gateway to horror was IT by Stephen King while for sci fi it was journey to the center of the earth by jules verne and Dune by Frank Herbert
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spoltz
Posted 2015-05-08 5:52 PM (#10475 - in reply to #4846)
Subject: Re: What Was Your "Gateway" Book to SF, F, H



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Location: Beaverton, Oregon, USA		Ever since I saw this thread, I've been trying to remember my first SF book. I read everything I could get my hands on as a little kid, but I think what got me into SF was watching "Lost in Space" back in 65 or 66 on our old black and white TV. I also loved the cheesy 50s SF movies on Creature Features on Saturday nights. The earliest I can remember is 2001: A Space Odyessy around the age of 12 or 13. By that time, I also wanted to be an astronomer, so read anything space related, including non-fiction. Then I can remember reading the Martian Chronicles, The Hobbit, and LOTR, Brave New World, Childhood's End, Lucifer's Hammer, and 1984 in my teen years. I know there must be an actual origin book before 2001, but that's all I can remember.
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