Thanks Star.  I'm still pondering the question: which of those early influences were genuinely life-changing?

I think I'd have to go with Clarke and Kubrick's novelisaation of their screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey as one of the first such books in my life -setting me solidly on a future reading path of based on SF/F foundations.  It gave me an anchor point both to go forward within genre, but also to dig back to Jules Verne, HG Wells and so forth. Contemporary high school English studies had us focused on works like Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos and The Day of the Triffids, as well as the Dickens and Shakespeare we were expected to absorb, so that helped too in spreading my reading horizons at the time.

And even as I write this, my brain wants to go off on a dozen or more different tangents, so that might have to do for now.

Also, yes I knew about the SFBC, but it wasn't available out here, and there was no local equivalent.

 

Mus

Surtac wrote:

Okay.  Every time I'e tried to answer this question in further detail I've ended up distracted and diverted down too many disparate and competing subject or topic rabbit-holes.  So I'm giving up any attempt to cover it exhaustively here in this thread and according it full Project status within The System here at Chateau Dysfunction.  It now has its own project notebook and I'll be adding to that as I think of more content and context.  If you're (un)lucky I'll be back here occasionally with the odd addition to list some more specific books along with appropriate context as to why they were or are important to me.

But for now, here's a list of some very early reading influences through primary and secondary school years ...

Kpo the Leopard by Rene Guillot was the earliest specific title I can remember reading.. It was from the primary school library at Claremont in suburban Hobart.  I can remember taking it on holiday to my paternal grandmother's  house.  Other early favourite stories were King Arthur and His Knights, 
Bulfinch's Mythology, Norse and other mythologies.

 Gods and Myths of Northern Europe by HR Ellis Davidson is a non-fiction history / analysis I also remember fondly.

 I started on SF because of the 2001 movie cinema release - Clarke, Asimov , Poul Anderson for both SF and fantasy.  Alao loved Michael Moorcock and Elric, REH and Conan, HPL and the Cthulhu mythos, Clark Ashton Smith usw.  Found  Zelazny, Sturgeon, Simak, Dickson, Bradbury and so on.

 Aviation, technology and science - Sagan, Hofstedter, Tsiolkovski, Penrose, Hawking etc.  (I was an Air Cadet at high school and was focused more on physical sciences rather than the humanities),

 Computing - Michie, Knuth, Wirth, Dijkstra, Hounsley, Tannenbaum and so on.  Tasmania was an early adopter of computing studies at secondary level.

 My introduction to Cherryh was the serialisation of The Faded Sun: Kesrith in Galaxy magazine in 1978.

Great to read t

Hoarding