Beloved stories from when you were much younger

[DEvens]

So what are some science fiction stories you read when you were very young that you still remember fondly?

This might be the book series I remember from the earliest. I know I read this first in grade 5 because I remember it was in the library at middle school.

https://books.google.ca/books?id=rfdTDwAAQBAJ
Space Cat. It was so much fun. Which caused me to go down the shelf it was on and read just about everything. Then the whole book case.

 

[phinds]

Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury, etc.

 

[hutchphd]

I was a very big Heinlein fan in early adolescence starting with Space Cadet in grade 5. And then the rest of his stuff including "Blowups Happen" about active human feedback control for the nuclear reactor. And then of course Asimov Bradbury and Clark. I loved "The Nine Billion Names of God"
And Orwell's 1984 left an remarkable impression

 

[DEvens]

Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury, etc.

Yes. I read _Stranger in a Strange Land_ in grade 6. That's round about age 11. From "Space Cat" to space hippies in about a year and a half.

 

[Buzz Bloom]

I remember that the first SciFi I read (as a pre-teen) was the collection
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventures_in_Time_and_Space (1946) .
The one story of that collection that stuck with me for many years afterward was
Anson MacDonald (pen-name of Robert A. Heinlein), "By His Bootstraps" (1941) .
I remember that I didn't find out that the author was Heinlein until my 20's. By then and after I found other Heinlein favorites:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Star (1956)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranger_in_a_Strange_Land (1961)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress (1966)
However, most of the Heinlein novels after that I began to not like.

The following are other fondly remembered other SciFi favorites from early years.

Asimov
foundation trilogy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series (1951)
Robot series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_series_(Asimov) (1950-1990)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightfall_(Asimov_novelette_and_novel) (1941)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiotimoline (1948)

Sturgeon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Than_Human (1953)

Ursula Le Guin is my all time favorite writer. Here are a few special favorites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocannon's_World (1966)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthsea (1968-2001)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Left_Hand_of_Darkness (1969)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Word_for_World_Is_Forest (1972)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lathe_of_Heaven (1971)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas (1973)

 

[JBA]

Both Asimov and Clarke were my early introductions to SF but the most memorable is Clarke's:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_with_Rama (1973)

 

[harborsparrow]

I have widely read scifi for several decades, and from all of it, my favorites remain: most anything by James H. Schmitz, and every one of the books in the Vorkosigan universe written by Bujold. Schmitz has quite a few long short stories, or short novellas. One I particularly loved is "The Tuvela". Every once in a while, I go and reread all or any of these, with great pleasure.

 

[Whipley Snidelash]

Schmitz, Van Vogt, Smith, Campbell, Wallace

I put these authors in their own category that I call super science. Their stories were filled with science beyond most science fiction’s already high science. I still read these guys.

 

[harborsparrow]

Have always been a huge Schmitz fan, own all his books and reread them every so many years. Don't know the others as well but will check them out.

 

[Whipley Snidelash]

Schmitz became my favorite too when I found him. If you like him you’ll probably like those others I mentioned. However none of them wrote my all-time favorite story. It’s called ‘the Specter General’ by Cogswell. It’s a short story from a magazine but I’m pretty sure that there was a long version also.

It’s a story about a stranded group of soldiers who are the last remnants of a galactic civilization before it became decadent. They are based on American Indians. They’ve been on this planet for generations when they finally get in contact again with the galactic civilization that they lost and they are the only ones still capable of the original technology that is mostly forgotten by the current inhabitants. Great story

 

[Whipley Snidelash]

My favorite is Agent of Vega. I reread that every few years.

Try these: the Weapon Shops of Isher, the Black Star Passes, Croyd and the Lensman series. Also Van Vogt wrote a short called Black Destroyer, well worth finding and reading.

Here is, in my opinion, the greatest collection of classic short stories published:
Famous Science Fiction Stories: Adventures in Time and Space, Healy & McComas 1946, 1957. Clothbound.

It contains the original story for the Thing, Who Goes There and the original story for the Day the Earth Stood Still, Farewell to the Master. It also contains Black Destroyer. Thirty five stories, many are great.

 

[harborsparrow]

Thanks for the recommendations!

 

[Whipley Snidelash]

Please let me know if you find that book and what you think of it.

It was on the library shelf in high school in the sci-fi section which I completely emptied before I was a freshman. Many years later I found it in a used bookstore. I lent it to someone and never got it back. I managed to find another one and still have that.

 

[cybernetichero]

So what are some science fiction stories you read when you were very young that you still remember fondly?

This might be the book series I remember from the earliest. I know I read this first in grade 5 because I remember it was in the library at middle school.

https://books.google.ca/books?id=rfdTDwAAQBAJ
Space Cat. It was so much fun. Which caused me to go down the shelf it was on and read just about everything. Then the whole book case.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was my first Heinlein. I read a lot of his books, partly because I knew I would (mostly) enjoy his yarns but also because I had a thing for the covers of the TOR (? maybe NEL) paperbacks with covers by Tim White.

The book I say is the first SF I ever read is The Borrowers. Now some say it's fantasy but there is no magic and all the solutions to their problems are real world ones so I say it's SF and view it as such.

I spent a lot of my early reading years reading anthologies of short SF like Surface Tension from The Seedling Stars by James Blish and T from Space, Time and Nathaniel by Brian Aldiss but the writer I really cottonned onto was Jack Vance. Most people go on about the Dying Earth but MY favourites are the "Planetary Romances" (a genre he is credited with creating) like Showboat World and the Tschai quartet.

There was also time spent on fluff like Anne McCaffrey's Pern books until I tired of them. Ditto Dune which exploded out of the starting box but tired long before the finish.

 

[harborsparrow]

Space Cat. It was so much fun. Which caused me to go down the shelf it was on and read just about everything. Then the whole book case.

Unfortunately, libraries are moving so quickly to digital that there are no longer extensive stacks of the classics that you can walk through and browse. Hence, it's important to write about these things on free knowledge sites like this one, Wikipedia, or The Citizendium. Else how will people ever find them in the future?

 

[hmmm27]

RAH and Andre Norton completely dominated my bibliophilic leanings as a child (and continued to do so for decades, after). Both had enough of a body of work, even at that time (late '60s), it took awhile to start in on anybody else.

 

[Janus]

My earliest reading with an SF motif were the "Danny Dunn" books in grade school.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Dunn

 

[Klystron]

I also loved Robert Heinlein's science fiction as a child and throughout my life. My eldest sister collected his 'juvenile' novels beginning with "Rocket Ship Galileo". Heinlein published a new story roughly once a year making excellent gifts for SF fans. My favorite RAH novel was "The Rolling Stones"; short story probably "All You Zombies...".One of the earliest true science fiction authors I read as a child would be swordsman and writer Cyrano de Bergerac. Our public library contained a diptych of two of Cyrano's novels translated into English where we travel to the Sun and later to Luna, the latter vehicle powered by chemical explosives.

Question in my young mind: Was Cyrano de Bergerac an actual person?

Edmond Rostand paints Cyrano as a flawed 'superhero' swordfighter, hopelessly in love with his beauteous cousin Roxanne, in the original play and many films based on characters in the play. Isaac Asimov describes Cyrano as 'the first SF author' but not if he means as a character from the play who writes SF or a real person. Heinlein portrays Cyrano de Bergerac as a mysterious rhyming fencing master who fights Oscar Gordon to the death in "Glory Road" while reciting verses from Charles Dodgson's "Alice" novels; among RAH's and my favorite books.

 

[ChemAir]

I remember writing a book report on a Louis Slobodkin book (Spaceship under the apple tree, I think). I really liked the story. There were a couple others, (Spaceship returns to the apple tree, The three seated spaceship...) with the same characters that I liked at the time as well.

Of course, I was in the 4th or 5th grade, or thereabouts.

I had to write a short story about the book characters doing something not in the story. I found my creative block at that time.

 

[cybernetichero]

Unfortunately, libraries are moving so quickly to digital that there are no longer extensive stacks of the classics that you can walk through and browse. Hence, it's important to write about these things on free knowledge sites like this one, Wikipedia, or The Citizendium. Else how will people ever find them in the future?

My primary school was closed a few years ago and I grieved for the excellent collection of books they had in the library when I was there but on reflection, that was 50 years ago and most of the books I loved there probably wore out years ago. My ex worked in a book binder's and said "they call it perfect binding because it isn't".

 

[Klystron]

Interesting point about old books wearing out. When our public libraries closed for pandemic isolation, I unpacked old paperbacks stored in the garage to bridge the gap. Several of the books fell apart just from reading, losing covers and pages. Apparently the adhesive dried to the point the paper detached from the binding in our dry climate.

Tor books held up well but Avon publications practically disintegrated. All the old paper discolored from the edges with ink fading in patches on a few pages.

 

[cybernetichero]

Newsprint paper is highly acidic and carries the seeds of it's own destruction. Over time it will turn into bran flakes.

 

[Buzz Bloom]

I recall as a preteen going to the library to get books to read for fun. These earliest fun books were dog stories by Albert Payson Terhune,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Payson_Terhune​

and horse stories by Thomas Clark Hinkle,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_C._Hinkle .​

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