Gateway drugs
I remember the moment like it happened yesterday.
Actually, given that I’ve reached that age where I can barely remember yesterday, I remember this pivotal moment like it happened mere seconds ago. In fact, it happened more than 25 years ago.
I was an early almost-teenager. I was also, like many reading this now, a voracious reader who checked a dozen books out of the library every week and devoured them. I had worked my way through the young adult section — although this was before the library actually labeled it that way — and had fallen dearly in love with Ellen Raskin’s books, particularly The Tattooed Potato and Other Clues.
Sadly, I was running out of things to read in that section. Which isn’t to say that there weren’t books on the shelves I hadn’t read, just that The Little House on the Prairie and Go Ask Alice knock-offs held no interest. Nor did the originals, frankly.
I mentioned it to the librarian, who I saw more than my own parents by that point. The librarian led me around the corner of the kids’ section and into a whole new world. I still don’t know who to thank for Northland Library‘s layout: the science fiction and fantasy section was just on the other side of the children’s area.
It was like entering Oz. The first book I pulled off of the shelf was Robert Heinlein’s Friday, the one with the iconic Whelan cover. It was exactly the right book at exactly the right time. My life was forever changed. I can still feel the spine under my fingertips as I pulled the books gentle weight off of the shelf. My grow-up brain has inserted a choir of angels singing hosannahs — but I’m fairly certain that didn’t actually happen.
Who knows what would have happened had mystery been through that doorway. Or self-help. Or romance. But we can’t dwell on what might have been. Friday was my gateway book. From there, I didn’t look back. I also methodically read my way through the shelves, starting with all the Heinleins I could find, then picking up with Asimov and working my way through the section.
I’ve been thinking about that moment a lot, mostly because I know most avid SF/F readers have one that is similar. I’m also noodling about with a book proposal on the subject — but that (and my current feelings about Heinlein (given that I’m both a parent and a female)) is a subject for another day.
And so, the question: what title pulled you into the genre and what made you stay?
Official SF gateway title is Rocket Ship Galileo at age 10, followed by all the Heinlein and Winston rocket-on-the-spine books in the public library, followed by the Signet edition of I, Robot, followed by everything else.
But the real gateway books were a kid's version of the Arthurian cycle (age 7), Edith Hamilton's Mythology (age 10), Macbeth (age 10),and the first book I ever bought for myself, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (age 10). If it bordered anywhere on the fantastic, I read it.
When I was seven or eight years old, my family took a trip to Ireland. We were visiting a house that had a big lawn, and I wandered out back to the gazebo, where someone had left a copy of Doctor Who and the Space War by Malcolm Hulke. I followed the blue box out into space and never looked back.
The first time I actually saw an episode of Doctor Who was twenty years later, when the franchise rebooted; by then I owned a couple dozen novelizations of older episodes and some five thousand other volumes of fantasy and science fiction. Who was such a potent SFnal gateway drug that it completely bypassed its native medium en route to getting me hooked.
I still have that copy of Doctor Who and the Space War. I'd frame it, but then I wouldn't be able to reread it, and it still makes me so happy to pull it down off the shelf.
Honestly, I don't remember. My mother read science fiction and fantasy, so she must have given something to me. It was probably Asimov; but I must have been young because I read Lord of the Rings by the time I was 10.
I don't remember the title, but it was an Andre Norton. She wrote historical adventure YAs, and I loved them. When I picked up one of her science fiction books, I didn't pay any attention to the rocket ship label on the spine and started reading it. I was hooked. Heinlein came next, and then Simak, Asimov, and so on.
Though I read a number of Scholastic Book Services SF books I purchased at school, the book that really got me hooked was one of the Tom Corbett series books – Revolt on Venus by Carey Rockwell. Rockwell must have been a pseudonym but have no idea who really wrote the book. After that the usual suspects – Norton, Heinlein, etc.
As an gamer, I fell into the Dragonlance Chronicles when they came out. This happened in high school, and it took a couple years to break out of the RPG novels into other fantasy. Even longer for science fiction.
I was eight or so and had blown through some of the first Redwall books and my aunt's childhood collection of early Pern installments, in addition to a bunch of non-genre YA stuff that all merges together in my head now. However, I wanted to be an astronaut and knew vaguely that there was something called "science fiction" out there with spaceships and stuff in it. Nobody in my family or circle of friends read it, though, so I had no idea what to expect or really where to find it.
There was some science fiction at the local library, I soon learned, but I'd already developed this whole set of expectations about what it was going to be like, and would be satisfied with nothing less than owning my very own science fiction book. My long-suffering mother drove me to Mac's Backs, Cleveland's awesomest used bookstore, and I ran up the stairs to their science fiction FLOOR, which seemed unimaginably huge at the time.
I was suddenly faced with walls and walls of the stuff. Wow, there was more science fiction out there than I'd ever imagined! Obviously I was going to read all of it, but I figured I'd keep it general to start with – I picked out a brightly-colored paperback with "SCIENCE FICTION" splashed across the cover, paid for it with some of my allowance, and started reading as soon as we got in the car.
The book was, of course, The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume I, and I couldn't have possibly picked a better introduction. The first story, Stanley Weinbaum's "A Martian Odyssey", had me in tears by the end, and all I knew was that I wanted more.
I read nothing but Wollheim World's Best SF collections for a while and was exposed to the best the old school had to offer before slowly working my way forward to the present as I grew up. I've never looked back, and I still think fondly of Tweel, who was my first literary alien and my very first tour guide of Mars.
My earliest memories include reading (or being read to) Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales (1852), a rewriting of Greek myths, and Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories (1902). These remain some of the greatest fables for young readers I have encountered. There was a volume of tales about Robin Hood for young readers, which edition I don’t know.
I have very clear memories of my father reading C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950), to me and my older brother at bedtime, when I was age five or six, and how desperate we were for each new chapter. A couple years later, my grandmother brought us Turkish Delight and we finally tasted the exotic treat with which Edmund had been tempted.
At age 11, I borrowed Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man (1951), which my brother had been reading. I enjoyed it, even though parts of it were a bit too scary. When I was 12, a friend at school recommended a book he had found in the school library, Robert Silverberg’s The Gate of Worlds (1967), which is perhaps Silverberg’s best young adult book, and remains overlooked by many, I believe.
That same year, over dinner, my mother (who had been a science fiction fan since long before I was born) and brother discussed a book they were both reading. It was about a desert planet, giant sandworms, and a mysterious drug called “spice” that was in all the food and turned the whites of people’s eyes blue. I borrowed it next, even though Dune (1965) was larger in scope and scale than anything I had read before. After that I was off to the races, reading voraciously.
As a child I adored Hugh Lofting's Dr. Dolittle books, and Narnia, and George MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind, but these were all mixed in with, oh, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Black Arrow, and Jules Verne's Michael Strogoff, and Pyle's Robin Hood, and Lorna Doone, and of all things a series of books that (I was later told) were for remedial readers: Cowboy Jim. Mixed in there too were some Andre Norton (Uncharted Stars and The Zero Stone stuck with me) and even Robert Silverberg's Revolt on Alpha C, though I didn't like that much.) I had no real concept of SF (or Fantasy) as something different.
I think things changed in 7th Grade … I would have been 12 or so. (In about 1972.) Our reading class had a deal where you picked a large card (folder sized) and read an excerpt from a book. Then you took a comprehension test or something … but the underlying motive, obviously, was to get you to find the whole book. And it worked. I know I encountered, for example, Leon Uris's Exodus there, and I read the whole book and liked it. There were tabs demarcating genres, and one of them was marked Science Fiction. In it I chose cards from Isaac Asimov (The Currents of Space), Andre Norton (The Time Traders, I think), Arthur C. Clarke (not sure which one — Against the Fall of Night, maybe, or perhaps The Sands of Mars), Clifford Simak (Time is the Simplest Thing), and Alan E. Nourse (The Universe Between).
Those, I knew immediately, were the real thing. And I went to Nichols Library in Naperville, IL, and ventured into the adult section and found the Science Fiction bookcase and before long I had read every book I could find by Clarke, Asimov, Simak, Norton, and Nourse. And I kept going — John Christopher (who, come to thing, I had encountered earlier, with the Tripods trilogy, and the Prince is Waiting books), J. T. M'Intosh (One in Three Hundred, a tattered hardcover, was the only book they had), more Silverberg such as The Gate of Worlds and, crucially, The Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Even, eventually, Heinlein — I read Orphans of the Sky first. But for some reason I only read a couple of the juveniles back then (Tunnel in the Sky being the other, I think) — only returning to them decades later.
It was a couple of years later, in 1974, that I happened across the August issues of Analog, Galaxy, and F&SF at the local drugstore and that was absolutely it forever and ever. (The same drugstore also had a tiny rack of paperback books with, it seemed, endless samples of Barry Malzberg paperbacks, which I snapped up and read with much enjoyment.)
I didn't have a chance. The SF drug was everywhere in my neighborhood. The SF section was on the right of the entrance to the public library in my hometown. The parochial school I went to had several Winston juveniles in the small bookshelf at the back of the classroom. But the first book I bought, with real hard-earned cash, (35 cents), from a revolving drugstore paperback rack, was Satellite E One by Jeffrey Lloyd Castle (Bantam). Soon, there was no hope and I had to turn to the Science Fiction Book Club to feed my habit…
Fredric Brown's _Martians Go Home_. SF can be funny.
I don't recall it as quite such a road-to-Damascus moment, but when I was 9 I was very impressed by a now almost forgotten novel called Star Ship on Saddle Mountain by an author with the unlikely (but real) name of Atlantis Hallam, who otherwise published a handful of stories in Spaceway magazine and apparently disappeared without a trace. About the same time I read Andre Norton's Star Man's Son; Heinlein didn't come until a bit later, and then it was Time for the Stars. These were all library books; the first paperback I remember buying was Bradbury's The Illustrated Man.
Fantasy is easier to trace. I absolutely fell in love with T.H. White's The Once and Future King and read it once a year for three or four years at least.
Like Russell, I didn't really have a sense of genre and would pick up anything that remotely looked fantastic. In a used bookshop on 12th Street in Kansas City I bought a pile of pulp magazines for what I now realize were dirt-cheap prices, but I also snagged the Mentor paperback of Ciardi's translation of Dante's Inferno, with a Dore illustration on the cover. I thought it looked like a terrific horror story. It was.
I know there are a lot of Trek snobs out there but it was Trek that
got me started into reading sci fi. My first book was Spock Must
Die and I went on to Asimov, Heinlien, Ellison, and too many more
to list here
My mother always read Analog magazine, so that was always around and SF books were around the house too. I read a lot of the Scholastic books too – I remember the teacher calling kids up to get 2 or 3 books, then she'd call me and I'd get this huge armful! There was one called "The Forgotten Door", and one in the school library that I just found again, "Encounter Near Venus". Then I found Heinlein, and the Motherthing, and flatcats, and I was hooked…
Don't remember early fantasy, but I remember the first fantasy book I bought myself – "A Wizard of Earthsea". That paperback is probably nearly 40 years old and held together with rubberbands, but it still has a place on my shelves.
I must have been about 10 when I glanced at an issue of Analog from a magazine display in a convenience store. I think the featured story was something by Mack Reynolds. I was immediately hooked. I continued to read Analog and other scifi magazines and began to pick up books by Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Poul Anderson, Simak, Norton, Alan E. Nourse, De Camp and a host of other popular and not-so-popular scifi writers of the day.
Two things: In a school "reader" volume, a tale about a trip to Mars and the discovery of lichens (which I mentally pronounced "litch-ins"); all other details now forgotten. And: Asimov's "The Martian Way," with its mysterious and beautiful multi-colored paperback cover, in Gene Lang Pharmacy in Boulder, Colo. – how sad that you don't see a wide selection of SF (or any books at all) in such places any more.
"The End of Eternity" by Isaac Asimov
My gateway was the original broadcasts of The Twilight Zone when I was way too young to have been allowed to watch it. Those shows formed my tastes. I later picked up Heinlein's Door into Summer from a stack of books my uncle was reading. That led me to all the Heinlein juveniles at the library and from there….