I think it's never too bad to have an item telling others who
we are and how we got into the sci-fi genre.

  I'll start.

   My name is Jim and I started off with ST:TOS back in the late 60's/early
70s when they were in thier first reruns on Ch 50. I really never thought most
of what Star Trek predicted would actually come true, but here we are with
little disks and sending probes to everywhere in the solar system.
   I havn't read much sci-fi, but I'm trying to include more in my reading
and one of these days I'll actually get round to reading the Narnia books
by CS Lewis, and the Xanth books by Piers Anthony. Both of these were
suggestions from friends.
   I have been reading (very slowly) Cosmos by Carl Sagan, and I'm just
beginning to get a handle on how the Universe works and what make black holes.
I know COsmos isn't Sci-fi, but it is a start, right?

18 responses total.

My name is Anne (duh. <grins>) I pretty much have always lived around
Star Trek- ie my dad liked it, so we all watched it. I'm personally
more interested in Fantasy, but there have been numerous sci-fi things
that I've liked.  A series of bok... that for the life of my I can't
remember the name of.   

I'm a Star Trek fan, but I don't devoutly watch it.  I also really
enjoyed Babylon 5.  Okay... More later.

I'm a TOS Trekker, too, though it's not my generation.  I believe that Star
Trek was way ahead of its time in technology and sociology (and I'm not
talking about the f/x or the props ;)
They predicted the celluar phone, some advances in computer science (hardware
wise) and the integration of the races (even though Uhura had a bit part).

I'm kind of dissapointed that the last two spinoffs (ie DS9 & VGR) seem to
have lost sight of the true spirit of ST.  Everything it either focused on
some ongoing war like a soap opera or getting home and inventing a new alien
species every episode.  I don't know what Gene Roddenberry would have thought
of what it's come to.

Also, I don't think Trek is going to survive Episode One, what with DS9 ending
and VGR dragging its feet... *sigh*  Tragic, isn't it?

I'm a cranky old participant in old-fashioned science fiction fandom -- 
the stuff with mimeographed fanzines, amateur press associations, 
conventions where people didn't wear costumes.
I started reading SF with the Tom Swift, Jr. series back around first grade
(1964?) , and then I got hooked into the horrid old LOST IN 
SPACE tv series in second grade.  Later on I graduated to Clarke and 
Asimov, and spent lots of time reading SF books and magazines until 
the Net ate my life in 1986.  The last significant SF book I finished
was probably Gibson's NEUROMANCER; I am determined to finish Connie 
Willis' DOOMSDAY BOOK by 2005.
 
My wife is a second-generation SF fan, and we met each other at 
several worldcons & Corflus in 1983-1986.  Having found each other
through fandom and paired off, we are now both pretty gafiated;
it's been about three years since we were at a convention, though 
some of that must be ascribed to Leslie's current grad school work.

I make occasional attempts to recruit some of you into my corner of 
SF fandom, but it never really works.

  "gafiated"?

I'm part of the TOS (The Original Show) Trek from the reruns of the 70's. 
But I like DS9 a lot too, which is recent.

Growing up I read lots of Heinlein, etc.  I guess I'm a 2nd generation SF fan;
my dad never seems like the sci-fi type but there was always the latest Dune
novel (Herbert) lying around.  I guess he liked the religious aspect to Frank
Herbert's books.  I still read a *lot*, at least 30 minutes a day.  I'm
reduced to picking interesting looking books off the shelf in the library,
and if I like it I'll absorb other stuff by the author later.

My dad brought a copy of "Citizen of the Galaxy" by Heinlein home when I 
was 12.  He asked if I was interested in science fiction, so of course I 
said "not really".  He was my *dad*.  I figured he was trying to 
catch me doing something wrong.  I'd watched Star Trek and Lost in Space 
and some Godzilla movies, and read some science fiction books, but 
mostly at that point I liked Westerns.

But I read "Citizen of the Galaxy", and liked it a lot.  Nuts, I 
loved it.  The next week he brought home "I, Robot", a collection of 
robot stories by Asimov, and I liked that, too.  Then I got into his old 
science fiction magazines; he had a lot of them from the late 1950's.  
Astounding (which turned into Analog gradually over the course of 1959), 
Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy, and a half-dozen more.  That got me 
several more Heinlein novels that were serialized.  "Starship Troopers" 
was serialized as "Starship Soldiers".  "The Door into Summer" and "Have 
Space Suit--Will Travel" were also serialized, and that's how I read 
them first.  I began to notice that I really liked Heinlein, and by the 
time I was 15 I'd read a dozen or more of his books.  By the time I was 
18, the year "The Number of the Beast" came out, I had them all, and had 
read some of them dozens of times.  I'd hijacked spaceships with Lazarus 
Long, and fought bugs with Johnny Rico, and argued with Jubal Harshaw, 
and masqueraded in political circles with Lorenzo Smith.  I read 
them in chronological order as published, and in order according 
to his future history timeline, and probably alphabetically, for 
that matter.  Heinlein was definitely my favorite writer.  I've given up 
re-re-re-reading his books now, but I'd have to say he's still my 
favorite writer.

        Get(ing) Away From It All is what happens when you gafiate.

Ayup -- it started out to mean "retreating into fandom, away from the real
world", but somewhere, the meaning reversed, and it now means "getting away
from Fandom for a while".
        Joinging the crowd on biographies:
        I grew up not having the foggiest idea that Science Fiction and Fantasy
existed.  I mean, sure; my reading ended up leaning toward the fantastical,
as did my television watching, but I wasn't really aware of SF as a separate
category until toward the end of sixth grade, where, in one of the very few
times I was sent to the principal's office, I discovered a friend reading
Tolkien.  Having gotten interested in The Lord of the Rings, I -had- to find
it, and my search for it at the local bookstore taught me something of which
I had not, somehow, been previously aware: that there was a whole section,
just for books with magical and fantastical and scientific elemnts!  After
that, my tastes and reading grew insatiable and omnivorous within the field;
through high school, I was reading a book a day, often two, reading Eddings
and Anthony side by side with McKillip, Zelazny, and Wrede (Not to mention
Le Guin).  I also, somewhere in there, developed a taste for Dr Who (though
I didn't get interested in Star Trek until much later).  
        Things went on, basically unchanged, until my first year of college,
where friend introduced me to fandom.  This was yet another revelation --
previously I'd heard of conventions, but largely in the context of the Cration
cons, which somehow never drew me, and I couldn't really get a handle on why
people bothered.  But after being dragged to the Staten Island Ferry meeting
of NYUSFS, and discovering not only that there were cool people I could have
conversations with, but that there was a whole branch of music, combining what
I liked about folk with show tunes and SF, I lept in, and never looked back.
        These days, my reading has dropped down (I'm down to only 1-3 books
a week, and I actually have discovered the joys of re-reading books now that
I've forgotten some of the good ones), but I go to somewhere between 2-6
conventions per year, along with a plethora of Fannish events, filking, SCA
events, and so on.  I also still filk, though I've never gotten around to
writing my own stuff.  
        I haven't seen Dr. Who in over a year, though.

Mmm, I wonder if mneme and I know any of the same New York fans.
Most of the ones I know are in the Fanoclasts group.

I know a fair number of the fanoclast types (Lise, Moshe, Hope), though I've
never been quite "in" that set.

I'm a little different from most of the fans I know. The first book
I ever remember reading was science fiction, a really bad pot-boiler
about aliens who lived inside people's heads as symbionts, and one
was a cop and one was a villain, coupled with a really anti-Red bias.
This was in 58 or so, given that I was all of two years old when I read it.
Then I started in on H. Rider Haggard, and whatever else I could find.
I was ten the same week Star Trek began, and I was a fan, though I was
disappointed with the Gorn episode, since I'd read the original story
about two years earlier and thought it was much better. (In fact, that
seems to be about my normal reaction to visual sf -- if it's from a 
written work, I'll usually think the written work is eight hundred
per cent better.) I never missed a Star Trek episode from then until
about the time Voyager came on -- now, I feel like everything in that
universe that could possibly be said HAS been said and I don't want
to see or hear any more in it. 
But I had never been to a convention until maybe five years ago, and
while I like them, I don't really belong to any particular group.

Mmmm. I do like filk music, and other fannish things (including
apas ) but I don't tend to actually get into any groups.

Forerunner of the Trills!  :-)

I started reading Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke and Verne in junior high, and
spread out from there.

I am trying to remember my first SF book.  We ha d a lot of books in the
house, but they were mostly rebbecca of Sunnybrook farms or Bambi's Children
type of things.  I went to the library to get teh SF.  Citizen of the Galaxy
is one of the first I remember reading, and then Have Spacesuit will travel.
Then I got into Asimov's I'Robot and the Federation Chronicles.

When STAR TREK came out, I had to nearly force my mother to let me watch it.
Mother was always xenophobic.

I'm of an earlier generation than the other folks in this item,
so my history is a little different.  My first brush with scifi
was late 1940's/early 1950's radio series (yes, radio not TV)
like "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet" and "Space Patrol".  The latter
featured Commander Corey and Cadet Happy, who apparently kept
order in the entire universe single-handedly by running around
to various planets, thwarting bad guys wherever they popped up.

I soon graduated to scifi books for young readers, such as
those that Heinlein was writing in the 1950's.

In the mid-1950's I discovered "Astounding Science Fiction"
magazine (now titled "Analog Science Fact & Fiction"), edited
by the legendary John W. Campbell Jr.  It served as my intro-
duction to such authors as Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson, Hal
Clement, Clifford Simak, and others.  By the late 1950's, I
was an avid reader of two other golden-age scifi mags,
"The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction" edited by Anthony
Boucher, and "Galaxy" edited by H. L. Gold.  In the scifi
magazines I read such things as "Citizen of the Galaxy", "Have
Spacesuit, Will Travel", "Starship Troopers," and "Dune" in
their original, serialized forms.  It was indeed a golden age.

Reminds me of the cartoons I used to watch on weekday afternoons in '65 and
'66.  "Space Angel" or some such; "Space Ghost" came later (but not much).

And I remember WKBD's re-runs of "Star Trek" in the late '60s and early '70s.
(And Al Fretter's commercials.)

I don't remember reading much SF before fifth or sixth grade.  It was probably
sixth grade that I discovered Heinlein, Asimov, Norton, Nourse, and a slew
of others.  I want to find that story about the telepathic mermen.

This response has been erased.

Space Angel was one of the early cartoons that featured the same animation
technique as Clutch Cargo adn Captain Fathom.  Basically they superimposed
a mouth and eyes over a still picture outline of the characters face.

Cartoons are a whole nother subject, though.

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