SF related memories (quite a few of them)
As a question to those following: What's your earliest sci fi memory - both
book or TV - and what (if anything) can you remember of Doctor Who ?
My earliest SF-related memory was shortly after my 5th birthday:book or TV - and what (if anything) can you remember of Doctor Who ?
the Apollo 11 mission. My parents (both SF fans) sat me and my
older brother in front of the TV and explained that this was the
most momentous news I would ever see in my life. They even
explained why - and oddly, I believe it should have been, even if
it wasn't.
The last men left the Moon on 14th December 1974 at a bit
before 11pm GMT. Since then we've not been back. In my
lifetime, men have walked on the Moon. In most of yours, they
haven't. Not because you died before we did it, but because you
were born after we quit it.
That's a bit poor, really.
As to more standard SF - my first reading was John Wyndham in
various forms and "The Hobbit" - my mother was and is a voracious
reader, and when it became clear that I was not going to get into
her other love - Agatha Christie and all that - she steered me in
the direction of John Wyndham. My father later joined in with
Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke. Something called "Jackanory"
- which very few of you will remember - introduced me to Ursula
le Guin's "Wizard of Earthsea".
On TV, the first Who I remember would have been John Pertwee:
something about a machine they were in designed for entertainment.
The first series I remember clearly was something about maggots
at the bottom of a Cornish mine, and the first transformation I saw
was at the end of a series full of giant spiders and blue crystals on
Metabelis 3 (?). I also remember a film about Daleks in the Earth's
future trying to destroy the Earth's core. The first really *scary* one
I remember was something with the Brigadier in it, with people whose
fingers turned into guns. That was definitely a "behind the sofa" job.
No doubt our resident Who archivists can date these prehistoric
memories. :-)
When I was young, I was still unsophisticated enough to enjoy
Shatner's posturings in what was called "Star Trek", but is now called
ST:ToS. I remember the original "Tomorrow People", a marvellously
camp American thing called "The Six Million Dollar Man", and
the wonderfully cthuloid "Quatermass and the Pit" - which I have on
a Hammer nostalgia DVD. I still want the one that followed - now
simply called "Quatermass" - with the aging prof in the future
(sometime in 1990s?) searching for his daughter who'd ran off with
the Planet People. Now that was scary.
I saw "Star Wars" in the cinema when it first came out, along with
"The Black Hole" and "Ghostbusters". I didn't see "2001" in the cinema,
athough I could have done - but it was not considered a children's
film, and so my parents didn't take me. The first "War of the Worlds"
I encountered was the George Pal version - and so when I read the
book, I wondered why it was set in England, and why the martians
used tripods.
I'm still bitter about realising that the whole purpose of the Moon
missions was "if we can put men on the Moon, we can sure as
Hell put bombs on Moscow". I expected better from a country founded
on a new frontier. And that disappointment still hasn't left me.
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