Reliving a seminal novel

[anghara]

I'm about to launch into writing something a little more extended than just an ordinary review for SFSite - writing about Frank Herbert's "Dune", and what the book meant to me. When it's up, I'll post a link - but for now, I'm thinking back, and remembering my first reading of that book and of what a revelation it was to me. It's almost like looking back through the years, reversing the flow of time, remembering the things I did not know back then, and those were legion. We are all young, once.

"Dune" was one of the shattering books of my own personal Science Fiction Raeder's Odyssey. It would be interesting to know - do you guys have such a book in your own past? Something that... just... changed you...?

Comments

[ashr501.livejournal.com]

I'd have to say it was probably "Dune" (and it's sequels) that did it for me too. I'd been reading SF and Fantasy for a while before that, but "Dune" really changed my way of thinking on SF. "Dune" was so much deeper, so much wider - the scope of it all was mind-boggling to me. That so much religious, philosophical and political thought was in there, waiting to leap out and change the way I viewed the world.

Only David Zindell's "Neverness" and "A Requiem for Homo Sapiens" have ever come close to repeating this experience for me.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

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[dsgood.livejournal.com]

For me, a short story: Anthony Boucher, "The Other Election."

Presidential candidate certain to turn the US into a dictatorship wins. Two friends manage to flip themselves into an alternate world in which the right candidate won.

Oops!

[pariyal.livejournal.com]

The Long Afternoon of Earth by Brian Aldiss. I read it from the library when I was a teenager, then forgot that it existed for years and years until I found a second-hand copy in, I think, 2003 and bought it; never dared reread it. Perhaps I will, now that I'm changing myself in subtle ways for Lent.

[lizziebelle.livejournal.com]

It was Dune for me, too. I actually read it in English class in high school. I was lucky enough to be going to a school that offered Science Fiction as an option. I had read lots of SF before that, and fallen in love with Ray Bradbury's work, but Dune really changed what SF could be for me. It created a whole new world, and a complete world at that.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Schvambrania.

I read it when I was ten, and over and over and over and over after that.

Also Gorky's autobiography, which ought to be online but I can't find it, and Sergei Eisenstein's The Film Form and The Film Sense.

It's almost a coincidence that these are all Soviet works.

Sure...

[seawasp]

... Doc Smith's _Lensman_ series.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Ursula LeGuin was my big revelation. The Earthsea trilogy laid the groundwork, and then The Dispossessed did the rest of the job. I'm still ready to head to Anarres on the first ship that'll take me there.