A Childhood of Science Fiction Classics

On Tik Tok (and occasionally some other reading groups) I talk a lot about my own experience reading classic science fiction and fantasy (mostly sci-fi). And I think sometimes that gives a false impression of age. But the reality is that a lot of the classic or vintage or generally older sci fi books I read as an older kid and a tween and a teen were quite a bit out of date. Ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years. Simply because that’s what I had access to.
While reading has always been important to my family, we couldn’t afford to buy them at full price at the pace I read them. That meant a lot of use of the library or second hand shops. There were also library cast-off sales, books pulled out of circulation from the library where my mom was a teacher, special clearance and warehouse sales she had access to as an educator. This all combined with the moderately sized personal library my parents already owned meant a lot of wading through back catalogs.
So while I still had access to a pretty decent selection of R.L. Stein and Alvin Shwartz and Amelia Bedelia and K.A. Applegate and American Girl as a young child through the school library and bookswaps, transitioning into older books got weirder. Once I plowed through Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, and what we had of Nancy Drew (all books my mom had bought for my sister fifteen years previous), none of the immediate adults in my life really knew where to guide me. They had been out of touch with young adult book releases for too long.
So I found myself let loose in the science fiction section of Half Price Books as a ten year old, found a Ray Bradbury short story collection for a dollar and that was sort of the end of it. Eating through old sci-fi books was an easy habit to feed at only a couple bucks a pop (at the time) and created enough confidence to actively ask my mom to spend money on new books in the same vein because I could provide her the necessary evidence that I liked them and would read them (then she could read them after).
This also gave me a really weird relationship with the community around books, though. I didn’t know a lot of people who read for fun, but when I did there were only occasional overlaps. When other people my age, particularly women, talk fondly of their teenage reading misadventure I’m left bereft of commentary. I didn’t even read The Song of the Lioness series (though I know I would have loved it at the time) because I could never find a free/affordable copy of Alanna: The First Adventurer. Yeah, I can do that now, as an adult (and I’ve considered it), but with an already ridiculous TBR, I don’t see that happening unless I share it with kids of my own.
Being so heavy on older books also really strongly shaped my expectations for what a science fiction book, in particular, is supposed to look like. When I was finally an adult with my own adult money to spend on as many books as I could afford, I found myself a little burnt out on what was feeling like a lot of “old white guy” books. I had to actively research, okay…what is actually out? What does modern science fiction look like now? And in the process I found out it had changed in a lot of ways for the better. But also ways I just wasn’t accustomed to as far as the nature of the writing itself. It took literal years in the 20-teens to get accustomed to what science fiction now looked like.
That’s also, however, why I’m so adamant that if you want to really stretch your brain, including genre specific classics in your retinue is the perfect answer. Because now, I can read almost anything. I can jump between decades with ease because I grew up in a reading environment with a lot of temporal variety. I can also contextualize new books in reference to old ones and act as a guiding force for other readers who want to explore classics themselves. So, in the end, there are more benefits than losses.