What initially inspired you to get into Fantasy or Science fiction??

[celestia]

Stevo was a good guy, what he did for conservation, but sometimes his enthusiasm was a bit too much, but he was a lot more popular tv wise in the states than here, his zoo is about 90 mins from here, but costs heaps so I haven't been yet.. Bindi's show is pretty good, it is nice to see a role model for young girls that isnt an anorexic bimbo, but rather a kid really enthusiastic about wildlife conservation and saving the planet.

[AE35Unit]

***************
Bindi's show is pretty good, it is nice to see a role model for young girls that isnt an anorexic bimbo, but rather a kid really enthusiastic about wildlife conservation and saving the planet.
***************

Hear hear. Start em young! And down with size zero!

[steve bolger]

I bought a David Gemell book by accident and loved it(Waylander) that hooked me on fantasy.I was given Frank Herberts classic Dune as a present as a teenager and it blew my mind! I'm still hooked!

[Connavar]

Originally Posted by steve bolger

I bought a David Gemell book by accident and loved it(Waylander) that hooked me on fantasy.I was given Frank Herberts classic Dune as a present as a teenager and it blew my mind! I'm still hooked!

Thats the luckiest thing i have ever heard of. Buying a Gemmell by accident.


My first fantasy book was by R.A Salvatore,his ultra generic Demon Awakens.....

[steve bolger]

I've never read R.A.Salvatore. Maybe i should?

[RodneyMcKay]

Originally Posted by Memnoch

So what initially drew you into these immense and ever varied genres?

The mere fact that it is immense and ever changing. My mother and father both were right into fantasy and I'm pretty sure I started loving fantasy when I read Shirley Barber's Fairy Stories.
Science Fiction was something I picked up on my own, no-one in my family really likes "zap-it" though my brother and I spend hours watching Stargate Marathons (It can take up to eight weeks when we watch all of them, so we don't tend to do that). I really can't say exactly what it is but I've always been a bit of a geek, attached to the computer, so this is definately a starting point for any Sci-fi addict.
So thats it in a nutshell

Rodney

[Sire Of Dragons]

I am so, so ashamed. My real life nick name for half of my life has been Dragon. Now here I recently started using Sire Of Dragons online ...

Dragons have played different roles in my life, I hunt them down online with a passion, I collect them, I read about them and watch every movie about them, I relate to them in my own sense...

Yet sadly, I have never even heard of the movie Flight Of The Dragons
(the movie mentioned by this threads creator)

I don't know how that was never mentioned to me or that it never crossed my path.

I just watched a preview, it looks really good. Now I need to get the movie.

I am so in awe right now.

[RodneyMcKay]

I'm sensing that you like dragons...

[Sire Of Dragons]

Thats rather an understatement don't ya think?

I just couldn't believe after all these years that I never herd of that. I mean it was made 22 years ago. Thats a long time to be unaware of something.

[RodneyMcKay]

Especially if you are that stuck into a topic... I see where you come from (New York I believe)... I actually mean't I know where you are coming from

[Montero]

Well I had a false start with my father handing me HG Wells when I was about 12. Read War of the Worlds, then the Time Machine (which was a bit marginal in terms of too scary all those white creatures) then the Island of Dr Moreau gave me nightmares for ages and I couldn't face any more.

Then about 2 years later I happened to borrow Anne McCaffrey's Dragonsong from the library and read it twice before handing it back and had to have my own copy. Most of her Dragon books happened to be out of print in the UK that year, but then they started coming back on the shelves. My local book shop was a small one so I had to order them, but that is where all my pocket money went that year.

I think John Wyndham was probably the next SF author I read. Read The Hobbit at some point but never could get into LOTR - text was too dry. The range of what I read just expanded with the available libraries and budget

I think for me the important things in the fantasy and SF I read are:

I can believe in the characters.
They have a lot more going on in their lives than trouble at school or marriage problems
You meet strange and powerful creatures/aliens

You can do anything with sf and fantasy settings - your imagination is the limit. I get to be somewhere totally else for a few hours. Also some of the SF additionally look at where the world might be going - in an interesting and ultimately positive way. (Forget apocalypse novels, way too much doom and gloom on the news already )

So to paraphrase the start of the thread - Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations

[Essie]

I know it's already been said but initially for me it was the Chronicles of Narnia which as a child I read over and over. From there I moved on to Tolkein and Ray Bradbury (I remember being blown away by his short stories). To a certain extent though I believe its in the the blood as it were. I've always loved TV with a scifi leaning right back to being very young. Doctor Who was always watched but even real kids programs of that era - Chocky (do you remember that?), the Tomorrow People, Tripods and all that sort of stuff - they were just what I wanted to watch. As a young teenager I remember being quite excited about the 'new' Star Trek which I watched avidly. Its always been there and always one thing I would choose to read or watch.

[Vladd67]

As a small child I watched a lot of Gerry Anderson, Thunderbirds, Stingray, Captain Scarlet, Secret Service, UFO, Space 1999. Its only since watching recent repeats of UFO as an adult I realised what a dark storyline it was. I started watching Dr Who with Jon Pertwee, I have vague memories of a series called Moonbase 3 which is odd as I was about 6 when it was shown, it must have made an impact. Then of course there were all the old American series, Time Tunnel, Lost in Space, Land of the Giants, Voyage to the bottom of the Sea, (even as a kid I felt there was something just not right about that sub) my childhood would have been very dull without Irwin Allen LOL,and The Invaders, add Star Trek on top of that and I had no chance. Bookwise what hooked me was buying through the Puffin book club at primary school a copy of Islands in the sky by Arthur C Clarke. After that I didn't look back.

[pyan]

Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein.....and my first SF author was Isaac Asimov.
Those three between them have an awful lot to answer for....

[Purdy Bear]

On Tv I grew up in the era when everything was Sci Fi :

Star Trek, UFO, Dr Who, Joe 90, Thunderbirds, The Bionic women, 6 Million Dollar Man, Stingray, Blake 7, Battlestar Galactica, Space 1999, Tomorrows People, thats without mentioning the more recent ones like B5.

The first almost adult book we had to class read at Primary school was the Hobbit, then the great Narnia series which I learnt to read out loud at secondary school. Once I learnt to imagine I was part of the story, reading became an obsession.

Then Dragons of Pern came into my life, swifly followed by David Eddings Belgerade, then Eoin Coffer ( his a real blast, espcially the Artemis Fowl series) and JK Rowling.