After a conversation with a colleague, we were talking about some of the great SF stories that were used* for movies, stories we almost remembered, etc.

One we recently brought up was Varley's "Air Raid"

Want to share some stories here that inspired, intrigued, etc? Do you recall reading a piece like "Air Raid" that inspired, got you thinking, or you've been trying to remember ever since?

What are some stories that inspired you (or made you stop and go hmmm...)

*that's another discussion in and of itself - if the story was a starting point, if it was mangled in the movie making, improved, and so on.

Ya know, I got started reading HG Wells ... because there was a time when that was just about the only SF you could find (when you were too young to wander about on your own <g> ) And the SF in Movies and TV was pretty tame.

Then one day I found AE Van Voght. Now =that= was SF that made me stop and go "Hmmm". From then on I was 'hooked' and read pretty much anything I could find Donaldson, Jordan, Foster, Leiber, Cherryh ... The list goes on <g>

Heinlein was a real eye opener for me as a kid, the alternate worlds just a step away postulated by Number of the Beast and Glory Road, the wonders of the Lazarus Long books, all of them had a big impact on an impressionable mind.

Got to admit, my intro to Science Fiction began on Television. Star Trek, Lost in Space, Batman, Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, Land of the Giants, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Time Tunnel, and The Wild, Wild West.

The first Science Fiction novel I ever read wasn't actually what you'd call a classic. It was called The Texas-Israeli War of 1999 and honestly, it wasn't bad, but sure wasn't anything to write home about either. First exposure to some really good Sci-Fi was a compilation of short stories called The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume 1.

Stories like Nightfall, Arena, First Contact, and Cold Equations along with many other classic stories really grabbed me for the first time and I've been hooked ever since.

My intro to SF was Ray Bradbury, so anything in The Martian Chronicles or The Illustrated Man.

Any of Cordwainer Smith's short stories, although The Dead Lady of Clown Town is a favorite

I broke into it with a Asimov short story collection book. Which I still have.

I pretty much got hooked by Foundation and the robot short stories by Asimov and, of course, the Heinlein juveniles. Then on to the rest of their work, van Vogt and Robert Silverberg.

I remember .. "The ugly little boy"

Oh, I remember that story.

I remember "Cold Equations" having a huge impact on me. When I started team teaching Science of SF, the physics professor and I would debate the story as humanities versus science.

I remember that story actually shaking me. I was just twelve years old when I read it for the first time, that hugely thick paperback in my hands, my mouth wide open. He didn't discover a way to save her. He didn't sacrifice himself for her. She stepped bravely into the airlock and he flushed her like a toilet. That was really my first literary lesson in "Life's not fair".

I reread the story. Several times. There had to be something there, there had to be some loophole that would allow her to escape. There wasn't. The name of the story was absolutely accurate. Cold Equations. Sometimes a very bad thing could happen to a very good person who had nothing but the very best of intentions because the math just doesn't work out.

I lost a little innocence that day, and grew up just a bit.

Barry,

I know the feeling. The funny part is, the engineering argument is something like, "elevators don't fall when they hit the 2001 pound. The tolerance is always higher than stated."

We had some great debates about that story.

The tolerance is the reason the ejection could wait until just before reentry. The usual objection I've seen is the lack of security on the pod.

The physics/engineering half of the show had lots of objections! It was interesting seeing/hearing readers' reactions after he got through with his portion.

I know what Barry means about learning that sometimes life isn't fair. Or rather, one of the things I learned was 'keep out or else' could mean just that. (And during my school-age years they wondered why I didn't want to ignore those signs!)

I remember my first fantasy collection. It was, Swords Against Death and I was a freshmen in college and found it in the book store while buying text books. Ironically I didn't read Tolkien until after I started playing D&D (after I graduated). Before that (The year between college and high school) I read a lot of Asmiov and Clarke, through I don't remember the first one any more. At that time I didn't care much for short stories and as a result came to Ray Bradbury much later than the other Biggies. In fact I might never have gotten around to Bradbury but for a very short, short story (if I remember correctly it is four pages) by Arthur C. Ckarke called: The Star which won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1956.

<heh heh heh> I remember that book. Wasn't it par of a series of ... I think that there are 4 or 5 books in the 'Sword and ...' series <g> I have not thought about those books in a long time. Thanks for the pleasant memories!!

Don,

Do you mean this story? I was recently thinking of the story as well as the computer being used to help compile all the names of God for the lamas. That one , too, is a story I think about quite a bit.

That's the one.

I was going to the University of Detroit, when I first encountered that story, in the Hugo Winners anthology from the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club (who remembers all those book club editions- that you got whether or not you wanted them if you were lazy about sending back your monthly statement).

Being a Detroiter you probably know that U of D* is Michigan's only Jesuit University so that story always has extra kick for me, being Jesuit educated and all.

Short stories have no set length and some are quite long. I think the fact that this particular on is so startlingly brief drives its point home all the harder. It sort of sneaks by as you try to read the plot and then wham bam, thank you ma'am ends so abruptly you can only go, "Oh my God!"

*Had to throw this out as well when I started hanging out with a bunch of guys, including Mark Stafford of Amber and STS fame, from Dayton it always cracked me up when they referenced U of D, meaning the University of Dayton. In my own parochial world view there is only one U of D.

I taught both stories sometimes in my various SF classes. They both pack quite a punch.

And of course there's only one U of D (like there's only one U of M or MSU).

I had been reading science fiction for a long while ... mostly Clarke, because for some reason I thought Asimov was too dry to enjoy.

And for a long while my favorite reading was SFWA "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volumes 1 and 2" ... how could you not be influenced by THOSE stories? Which of course included "Cold Equations" as well as as "Scanners Live in Vain" and "Flowers for Algernon" and the "The Witches of Karres".

But it wasn't until later that I was to read a short story that I have held close to my heart since. Today the Author is Famous, not for his science fiction, but for his fantasy. I could never really get into a Game of Thrones ... but once, at the beginning of his career, George RR Martin wrote a story for Analog by the name of:

"With Morning Comes Mistfall"

It is the story of a far off loch ness monster, and the triumph of science over legend and myth. And yet for a science fiction story, it was rare and unique. Because the technological victory was bittersweet.

It reminds us that often the question is worth far much more than the answer ... that the world just might be a better place where unicorns and dragons and wraiths might be ... rather than one where it has been proven they are not.

Its a story I can't forget.

I have read much of Martin's work. I was not impressed by the movie and I will admit that it took a bit of reading before the GoT novels really captured my interest. But in the end, there is a reason that they decided to make it a movie <g> You might want to give them a second look some time <g>

GoT is my favourite series of books and the TV series is pretty darn good too!

This isn't really SF - though it was published in Asimov's Children of Tomorrow anthology.

Long before Hogwarts, was Robert Sheckley and his story "The Accountant."

I remember it a fun little tale showing where true evil can be found... accounting!

"A Pail of Air" by Fritz Leiber. Until I was recently leafing through a collection of Leiber's writing, I'd forgotten that he'd written this one!

"Pa had sent me out to get an extra pail of air."

By the Great Bureaucratic Seal!

There's a copy of Boris and Arkady Strugatsky's Tale of the Trioka available online!

Tale of the Trioka or What If Lewis Carroll Was Russian.

I don't know which version it is. There were two - the first novelette, which was fairly cynical ... the second novelette that somehow managed to get adapted for a magazine ... both of which ended up on the cold war-era Soviet Politically Incorrect Book List faster than a pterodactyl can eat a welcome sign.

"Pterodactyls are vermin: do not feed them."