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When I was a kid, before Harry Potter and the recent influx of sf and fantasy for kids and young adults, I made my way into sf and fantasy from reading Susan Cooper, the Borrowers by Mary Norton and Madeleine L'Engle to Andre Norton and Anne McCaffrey. Nowadays there is quite a bit more fantasy and sf for children. But there are also a lot of movies and television sf programs. Which is more influential to how you started reading sf and fantasy -- was it books or other visual media that led you to the genre.

Had to be The Hobbit for me. I really did not like reading when I was younger (elementary school age).

My dad read it to me at a very young age and it stuck so well, I have a hard time enjoying anything but fantasy. Well...and science fiction.

Susan Cooper was definitely an inspiration for my fantasy likes also.

Oh.... and mythology.... Roman, Greek ...Norse

:)

I got started with Heinlein

I did find Heinlein, but I think after I started reading sf with Norton.

I have always been a huge reader and when I was kid my parents made sure I read the sf/f classics along with all the other great kids books - Narnia, Wrinkle in Time, etc... I even did a book report on The Fellowship of the Ring in the fourth grade! But the first author I found on my own who really made me love fantasy over any other genre was Tamora Pierce with her Song of the Lioness quartet.

As with a lot of people, it had to be the hobbit. After that, I started playing D&D with some friends and I have been a fantasy addict ever since.

For SciFi, it had to be the movie Aliens (which I watched when I was 11, shhh). I still like my Scifi horror tinted. I also found the dune books early on (inspired by the computer game dune 2 :P) Did not like the movie though, even at that young age.

The first author I remember is Robert A. Heinlein. But as a grade schooler, I read the Tom Swift Jr series by Victor Appleton II, who was really a multitude of authors. At that time, I also read a lot of sci fi books from the library but darned if I can remember either the titles or the authors. But I do remember a number were about Mars and Venus!

Mythology and a love of "pretend". I think Andre Norton was one of the first SF authors I read, and Asimov, Isaac. Oh, and A Wrinkle in Time. I think J.R.R. Tolkien and Frank Herbert and Ursula K. Le Guin followed. 2001: A Space Odyssey was the first SF movie I recall, but I have a terrible memory so there may have been others. Does watching "My Favorite Martian" on TV count? And I was a huge "Star Trek" fan--the original TV series.

Edited to add that "Camelot" was also a huge influence--the Arthurian myth/legend/history, Merlin the wizard/Druid/magician, and the romance.

Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert Heinlein. It changed the way I looked at everything. The Caves of Steel made a big impression. I could see how robots would become important. Oath of Fealty suggested the future of gated communities.

I am not quite sure. I remember reading The Three Investigator series and another about a kid who finds an egg and it hatched into a Dinosaur. My parents bringing me to see Star Wars with I was 9 or 10.
My Dad used to take us to the used bookshop in town and I picked up Star Wars. Read it and when we went back discovered The Fellowship of the Ring. I had trouble getting through the opening chapter so went and found the Hobbit and I was off the the races.

I started out watching Star Wars and Star Trek: The Next Generation with my parents. My dad read us Asimov, Bradbury, and Doyle when I was a kid while my mom read us kids' mysteries and other classics, and I read most of L'Engle on my own. School had me reading The Borrowers, A Wrinkle in Time, and The Hobbit, but my own sff reading really took off when I started reading the Star Wars EU and everything Asimov I could get my hands on in middle school.

So I guess visual media got me started but books kept me going!

Ken, my mom used to read my sister and I the Three Investigators books.

Something just came to me
My Dad, at the time, was reading mostly Non Fiction. My Mom was into the Romance stuff. My Dad didnt really like my reading choices and tried to get me to read other stuff. He didnt force me or nothing, he just tried to get me into other stuff. Back then it was SF and Fantasy only. Later on I started to read other stuff, in my 20s.

Lindsey wrote: " School had me reading The Borrowers, ..."

I forgot about The Borrowers--loved them!

The books that got me into scifi and fantasy were the Hobbit and a book called Greensmoke by Rosemary Manning - That was the first book that I can actually remember reading and I still love reading the adventures of Susan and R Dragon :)

-HMC

Ack, can't believe I forgot Shadow Castle! That was probably the first "fantasy" book I read on my own. Still a favorite to read and share today.

"What influenced you to read sf and fantasy"...

The day my father gave me this book (I was around 12 years old):

By erich von däniken.

My father said; people tend to belive in something. Dont take anything at face value, read about it yourself.
That year I read the Norwegian translation of the Bible, I read three books by erich von däniken, I read a book I dont remember now about who jesus married and what the holy grail "really" was. I read up on Budda and hinduism also as far as I remember.
That year got me to strengthen my belive in absolutely nothing, just that the humans need to fend for themselves. Basicly a humanist-atheist.

All this opened the way for scifi for me. I started reading books by Arthur C Clarke. The Rama-series is the greatest of them all I think. I read the books of Ben Bova and started to read star treck and Donaldson and some other scifi that tended over to the fantasyrange.

My absolute favourite scifi/opera is the foundation-series. I hope to forget enough so I can reread it soon... :)

Tolkien, Ursula Le Guin,CS Lewis, Alan Garner. It was always fantasy books when I was a child that created the best worlds, that had the strongest most original characters and that had me breathless with excitement. I think I'd already figured out by the age of seven that most fantasy worlds were rather more fun than the real thing.

i only read when i had to ie for a project in school and never really picked up a book until in my early 30's but i was a massive sci-fi fan and less so of fantasy but still a fan.

What got me hooked would have been things like Star Wars, Krull, Battle Beyond the Stars and stuff like this.

What got me hooked in reading was firstly Sir Arthur C Clarke.. i followed him because of his early Mysteries of the Universe tv show but what got me ultimately hooked into reading was Perdido Street Station.. since then ive managed to fill my bookcase :)

The Lord of the Rings, Mary Poppins books, the Earthsea trilogy; books first and then the original Star Trek series and Star Wars etc.

Farseer trilogy by Robin Hobb, followed by Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind. Dune by Frank Herbert and Starship Troopers by Heinlein after I bought the games based on these works. Eragon by Christopher Paolini, didn't really like this one.