[mchc]

Grew up in the 50's. Only access to books was in libraries. Got hooked into SF: 1) Escapism 2) Loved the radio space operas when I was a child. Which progressed naturally into the Sat. cliiffhangers on early TV, Flash Gorden and such.
As I learned how to read, gravitated to hard SF, where I was first exposed to hard core satire and the possibility that maybe, just maybe, a world could be created that was ruled by justice and rationality.
However the older and more cynical I became the less I believed that world would or could be planet Earth.
The "moon" and this solar system was just to close for comfort.
Then came writers who'd actually built worlds from scratch based on the known physics of our universe. From there I've just progressively read whatever was new no matter where it went.
One of my biggest gripes, and why I don't think there was any so-called sf 'golden age',
was the dominant macho male / alien phobic / sexist thinking that oppressed the genre for so long.