what was the first scifi/fantasy book that completely blew your mind?

[Tim]

a book that had me completely engrossed was Arcade. a highly underreated and overlooked book IMO.

[Callum]

I know this isn't quite on the same scale as a game of thrones or foundation series, but Ready Player One was the first Sci fi book I literally couldn't put down, and got me into others like enders game and neuromancer. Which just started a very prevalent addiction.

[Thane]

Callum wrote: "I know this isn't quite on the same scale as a game of thrones or foundation series, but Ready Player One was the first Sci fi book I literally couldn't put down, and got me into others like ende..."

Nothing wrong with that! It's a great book. Scale doesn't matter, what matters is that you found a great book.

[[deleted user]]

I've always read SciFi. Tom Corbet, Tom Swift and all the rest as a kid. The first one that blew my mind was Foundation. The scale, concepts, span of time was beyond anything I'd even imagined. I quickly read the other two books. Then read the robot stories. Whatever Asimov I could get at the local library.

For fantasy, it was The Lord of the Rings. I didn't read fantasy before that. It just wasn't widely availble in the early seventies. The Ballantine Adult Fantasy series was just getting started and I bought lots of those. Nothing like Tolkien, but some very good reads. Then I discovered some books in the kids section of the Library, LeGuin and L'Engle. As a teen I was embarrased to be seen there, so I made a quick dash to the shelve. It was well worth it. I'd sometimes mention to the check-out clerk they were for my younger brother.

I was hooked. Never looked back.

[Axel]

The Hobbit (tried LOFTR when I was a kid, but it was kind of dense for my age). Then I moved to the Dragonlance series, and more recently I loved The Name of the Wind.

[Callipygian]

I don't have a real childhood moment for a genre book blowing my mind. My mother was reading me the Tolkien books before I could read myself. So to me books *were* sci-fi and fantasy. That said, reading Neuromancerwhen I was in highschool was probably the most mind-blowing moment for me.

[Karin]

The first scifi/fantasty book to blow my mind was Nightmare Journey by Dean Koontz when I was 11. I don't particularly remember what it was about the book that affected me so strongly but I still clearly remember the title,author and plot details, when other books have just fallen to the wayside of my memory.

[[deleted user]]

Dracula by Bram Stoker. I reread it almost every year. The magic is never lost.

[Gregor]

I might have to say Cat's Cradle.

[Wilmar]

I have to say that the 1st sci-fi book that blew my mind was Neuromancer. The descriptions and the world felt very real and believable. It was seedy, it was grungy, it was definitely a great and bladerunner-esque world.

But Wool Omnibus (Silo, #1)from Hugh Howey was just awesome. Great characters, great world, I loved reading it.

[Tatiana]

Dune was definitely my gateway drug into SciFi, but David Weber On Basilisk Station is what hooked me into the genre.

[Symian]

For me, it was Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light, then Creatures of Light and Darkness, which I read directly afterwards. The beautiful prose and mind blowing concepts completely changed the way I thought about writing and language. That obsession with the art of the language lead me to J.G. Ballard. After that Neuromancer and all things Gibson became my favourites. Gibson is one of the only authors I know of who can skilfully balance deep and artful prose with grand speculative ideas and the grit and action of a well-paced SF story.

[[deleted user]]

If you count ghost stories as fantasy then it was definitely The Beast by R.L. Stine. I read that when I was 8 years old and it got me hooked on reading.

If you don`t count ghost stories then it was my 5th grade teacher reading The Hobbit. The year after that at age 12 I read both The Fellowship of the Ring and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, which had just recently come out, and I was totally hooked.

For Sci-Fi, well, I was reading X-Men comics before I could actually read. If you`re talking specifically novels then it was probably Jules Verne`s Journey to the Center of the Earth which I read at 17 that really got me reading sci-fi.

[Nathan]

The Call of Cthulhu by HP Lovecraft

[Will]

The Eye of the World

[Art]

for me it was probably Narnia. That's what hooked me. But the one I was old enough to be aware of was His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. The science and different worlds blew my mind as a teenager

[Karl]

Star Surgeon (1959) by Alan E. Nourse
http://www.amazon.com/Star-Surgeon-Al...
http://manybooks.net/titles/noursea18...
http://librivox.org/star-surgeon-by-a...
http://www.sffaudio.com/?p=1299

I was 9.

[Rik]

Mark wrote: "Fantasy for me was The Elfstones Of Shannara (lets hope the new MTV series doesn't suck - but I don't hold out much hope of that!)
"

Elfstones was the first book I remember that ever made me cry. It even got to me the 2nd time many years later even though I knew what was coming.

[Pat]

It was The War of the Worlds. I was around 11 or 12 & remember hearing the Jeff Wayne album at a friends house and being totally blown away by the story & getting the book the next time I visited the library. I'd always been interested by SF having grown up on Dr Who and old movies but that was the first proper SF book I read.

[Kristian]

I think that Eragon, and Christopher Paolini's world is probably what made me just finally decide that epic fantasy is my thing.

[Pickle]

i got hooked on Sir Arthur C Clarke so it would have been the 2001: A Space Odyssey sequence of books.

[Brightlord]

The first book that made me fall hard for fantasy genres was The Way of Kingsby Brandon Sanderson. I had a boring job so i thought i'd kill time with reading books. I dont remember how i stumbled upon that particular book, but I enjoyed every bit of it.

[Jenny (Reading Envy)]

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, because of the emotional reaction.

[Michael]

Even though both A Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Twenty thousand leagues under the sea are sci-fi and great stories they didn't really lead me to read more sci-fi simply because they were not really technically fiction at the time I read them.

Since not many sci-fi books was translated to Danish in the 80's and I had not started reading in English instead, my first book that really sparked me into sci-fi was The Many-Coloured Land.

In fantasy it was no doubt The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

[Neil]

The The Hobbit. Also the first book I read multiple times. Couldn't put it down way back in the day.

[Redrosevertigo0]

A Wrinkle in Time.

[Rich]

I've always been into SciFi, but I ignored fantasy until reading Robert E Vardeman's "War of the Powers" series back in the mid-80's.

[Amy]

Tamora Pierce's The blue Sword captivated me as a middle schooler. It was a precious book to me and I've loved Pierce ever since.

[AndrewP]

Rich wrote: "I've always been into SciFi, but I ignored fantasy until reading Robert E Vardeman's "War of the Powers" series back in the mid-80's."

Yeah those are great books. I already mentioned them over on the 'Recommend something nobody has heard of' thread. The UK version collected into two trade paperbacks is probably the nicest.

[Shaun]

For me it was "Thin Air," by George Simpson and Neal Burger. When the movie, "The Philadelphia Project" came out, it seemed, if not base on, certainly inspired by the book.

[Themcbays]

I was eight and started with Hardy Boys, which led to Encyclopedia Brown which had a Jules Verne book sitting next to it at the school library, which led me to HG Wells, which led me to Tolkien. Haven't stopped since.

[Emily]

I've always loved fantasy (I'm pretty sure my father read me the Hobbit while I was still in utero), but the first series that completely stole my heart in a way I didn't even know was possible was Robin Hobb's Assassin's Apprentice. SO GOOD.