Your first SciFi/fantasy book

[LeonStevens]

Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man was the first one I remember reading on my own.

Yeah. I'm quoting myself...

In Grade 5, our teacher read a chapter of A Wrinkle in Time to us each Thursday. I looked forward to that in anticipation each week.

 

[Fiberglass Cyborg]

"Doctor Who and the Cybermen" (a novelisation of the '60s Who story "The Moonbase." Um. Spoilers.) For some reason I had this knocking around in my room before I was old enough to read it; I finally read it aged about 7.

 

[Harpo]

I first answered this fifteen years ago, so here’s that post again

Your earliest sci-fi memory...

I have a disitinct memory of reading two short stories in a sci-fi story magazine (something like Asimov's Science Fiction) when I was in fifth grade ( ten or eleven years old). The stories have stuck in my mind to this day. One was called Enid I think. It was about a boy who has what...

www.sffchronicles.com

 

[Spade]

Aside from my Goosebumps, Animorphs, and Star Trek books, the first original piece of SF I read was Orion by Ben Bova. I was hooked after that. I remember dragging my mom to the used bookstore to buy everything Bova they had.

 

[Eternity_TARO]

My first Sci-Fi book was in the 3rd Grade. The Wonderful World of the Mushroom Planet. It was what I consider my first real book because it was 150 something pages and barely had any pictures in it, like 10 pictures total.

It was about 2 boys who built a rocket to go to the moon and when they went to the moon they discovered it was inhabited by beings that were starving and had no food. So the boys went back to Earth, and got some chickens and returned back to the moon and solved the food crisis because apparently a few chickens can lay enough eggs to feed an entire starving civilization LOL which made sense to me when I was in the 3rd grade I guess.

And I was hooked on Sci-Fi every since

 

[psikeyhackr]

Jesus H Christ!

Most of you ppl make me feel really old.

This was my first SF book read in 4th grade:

Star Surgeon (1959) by Alan E. Nourse

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Star Surgeon, by Alan E. Nourse.

LibriVox

LibriVox

librivox.org

I was really shocked that no adults had told me that the stars were suns and the Sun was just another star. Mind Boggling!

Of course all of you people who have watched Star Wars and Star Trek for decades are going:
Yeah, So What?

Whipper snapper jerks!

 

[worldofmutes]

I don’t quite remember. I remember staying up and reading a short ~100 page book with a dragon on the cover. Well, it was about a boy who raised a dragon hatchling.

After that I started picking up a few Dragonlance chronicles, and I guess the next one I read (and still own) was The Magic of Krymm: Short Stories.

 

[zmunkz]

When I was a little kid my mother read Watership Down to me, and a couple years later I got into Redwall. I suppose those count. But the first one I read when I was a little older and knew what was going on was Blue Moon Rising. I have reread it recently and it’s not very good… But at the time, it completely transported me and mesmerized me. That book is the reason I’m still into fantasy.

 

[BryBry326]

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It was cool to read then see the movie.

 

[Foxbat]

When I was young, a regular christmas present were books. My parents used to buy me these lovely hardback classics especially abridged for children. They ranged from R.L. Stephenson to Jules Verne. I distinctly remember having both Journey To The Centre Of The Earth and 20000 Leagues Under The Sea so it would have been one of them. For years afterward, I thought the title of the latter meant that the sea was 20000 leagues deep. I didn’t realise it referred to distance travelled

 

[psikeyhackr]

. For years afterward, I thought the title of the latter meant that the sea was 20000 leagues deep. I didn’t realise it referred to distance travelled

I thought that too. I can't remember how I concluded it was distance.

 

[Bick]

I thought that too. I can't remember how I concluded it was distance.

Perhaps it was down to the maths?
20,000 leagues is about 82,000 miles, which is so far 'down' it is out the other side of the Earth and into space by a further 74,000 miles, more than a quarter of the way to the moon!

 

[Justin Swanton]

I think it was Clarke's The City and the Stars for me. Or it might have been a novel (forget the name) about a boy who invents an antigravity drive and builds a homemade space ship in which he flies to Mars where the drive breaks, stranding him.

 

[tinkerdan]

Perhaps it was down to the maths?
20,000 leagues is about 82,000 miles, which is so far 'down' it is out the other side of the Earth and into space by a further 74,000 miles, more than a quarter of the way to the moon!

Oh, is was a space craft; that explains everything.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

For fantasy, the first would either be The Wizard of Oz, or The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, by Dr. Seuss. It would have been so long ago, there is no way of knowing which came first.

For SF, it would almost certainly be, as I have mentioned before, one of the Mushroom Planet books.

 

[Bren G]

Hard to remember for me, but I recall ripping through the Piers Anthony Xanth series quite young. And of course, the Doctor Who novels.

 

[rscottb]

In the summer of 1978 a bookmobile drove through my neighborhood. I followed it on my bike until the driver noticed and stopped. I checked out The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks which was quickly followed by the remaining books in the trilogy, The Elfstones of Shannara and the The of Shannara. Later that summer, I used my saved allowance at Waldenbooks in the mall to buy A Spell for Chameleon by Piers Anthony and Lord Foul’s Bane by Stephen R Donaldson.

These books started a fantasy book reading binge thats still strong 43 years later.

 

[Perky]

The first Fantasy book I read was Grimm's Tales or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, I don't remember very well. I can say that I was more focused on comics, manga and video games. I only started to get into fantastic literature a little later. As for the first sci-fi book it was The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, both by author GH Wells. And maybe a little Lovecraft, if that's sci-fi inclined.

 

[hitmouse]

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It was cool to read then see the movie.

This dates me. If I were to write this passage it would read: THGTTG. It was cool to listen to the radio show when it was first broadcast in March 1978, and to read the book when it came out in paperback in 1979.

 

[AllanR]

This dates me. If I were to write this passage it would read: THGTTG. It was cool to listen to the radio show when it was first broadcast in March 1978, and to read the book when it came out in paperback in 1979.

At my gaming club, one of the fellows would bring a radio. All gaming stopped for thirty minutes as we listened to THGTTG.
It was a rebroadcast from a university station. We didn't get it right away in Canada.