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 these early influences, ‘tac. Which stand out as “life-changing”? 
I also read and loved many of these. (Clarke, Asimov, Anderson, even Moorcock, and others)
I may write another post along these lines: history of early reading favorites and influences. Seems maybe adjacent to the life-changing theme, but of great interest.
I’ll add one major influence early on: in fifth grade, age 10-11, my parents let me join the Science Fiction Book Club. I don’t know whether this was a thing down under. But I remember you got five free books for joining. I don’t remember the fifth of my initial selections, but I do recall that four of them were Dune, Anderson’s The Dancer from Atlantis, Stranger in a Strange Land, and the two-volume A Treasury of Great Science Fiction. That club led me directly into the science fiction of the 50s and 60s, and it all mushroomed from there. 
Oh! I just remembered the fifth book: the essential Slaughterhouse-Five by Vonnegut.

Funny, I never read that 2001 novelization. I’d seen the movie pretty early, and it never occurred to me to read the later book. And Wyndham definitely wasn’t on the high school curriculum. Why they thought we’d enjoy Silas Marner, I’ll never know. I only read Wyndham after 40, I believe.

i also discovered Verne early. Loved Around the World in Eighty Days, Twenty Thousand Leagues, and especially Journey to the Center of the Earth.