[Ehkzu]

I grew up in new suburbs of Los Angeles in the late 40s and early 50s, and it was blank. Boring architecture, boring big flat valley, boring schools, boring kids (I was the one of the few college-bound kids), nothing at home (drunk mom, emotionally absent dad). So scifi was an escape--gave me the futile hope that I'd been left here by accident & my real parents would come & get me. They had science fiction theater on AM radio at the time--maybe that gave me the first inspiration. And some truly cheesy sci fi shows on TV where the "special effect" was a paralyzing ray gun. Aim, fire, and the guy you shoot freezes. The first CGI I can recall was the id monster in Forbidden Planet--you only saw it when it was illuminated by the humans' rayguns. Apparently Disney's aimators did the monster. Oh, and it had the first electronic music score of any movie. The music would be innovative even today--and really stand out amid all the thundering John Williams and Williams wannabe soundtracks.

For books, a mix of Dr. Doolittle's Adventures and Heinlein's kid stuff, followed by Asimov, Clarke etc.--people with great ideas whose limited writing skills were invisible to the excited kid I was. I especially loved the exobiological stuff like Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity.