As for SF, I read 20000 Leagues Under the Sea. It may have been an abridged version, though (I was young when I read it).

Is Frankenstein older? I read that in high school.
 

E.E. Doc Smith. A great space adventure writer. His Lensmen series is number one but he also wrote the Slylark series and the Family D'Alembert series. If you like adventure you will love those books. Kind a funny thing though in the Skylark series they make a radio out of energy complete with a type of vacuum tube.

An aside here but Goggle is great for this. There's an anime Lensmen story and a Lensmen website.

And there's a H. Beam Piper. His Fuzzy novels are great. No, the books are not furry.. These are about Fuzzy Sapiens A couple were written after his death to continue the series. And at least some of them are in ebooks form. Oh wow, there's another one coming out...about now if its on schedule and wikipedia is correct.

And another Oh wow I had forgotten he did "Lord Kalvan Of Otherwhen" maybe the first Alternate universe book I read. Loved that series. Well, another of his, "Paratime", might have been the first one. He did a few other novels too.

[This message has been edited by LDWriter2 (edited May 02, 2011).]
 

Yeah, there's older speculative fiction out there, but I don't recall reading any of it. I avoided much of required HS English because my family moved three times in four years, so I ended up reading Macbeth four times (sadistic Senior year AP English teacher, lol) and never did have to trudge through Beowolf or Gilgamesh. Well, Gilgamesh once in college, but that was it. And that was a religion class, not a lit one.

So I'm sticking with the stuff that made my heart sing and laid the foundation for wanting to write speculative fiction today - that's Asimov and Heinlein, reading every single title of theirs present in my grade school library. And being the only (I mean ONLY) girl to find the SF section at all (I can still picture exactly where it was in the stacks of our very small suburban Catholic grade school...)

The first SF book I read? Well, I read and liked things like The Enormous Egg and The Spaceship Under the Apple Tree, without thinking much about their SF content, or even if it was SF...the first one that stuck was Heinlein's Space Cadet, which is kind of the fulcrum on which my life rests.

(I realized a while back that the time from when Space Cadet was first published to when I read it, was about half the time from when I read it to right now. Man, a lot of water under the bridge...)
 

That series may have been before the "Programed Man" as may be the "Venus Revolt" or is it "Revolt On Venus"? by Heinlein . My memory is a little fuzzy that far back. But I think the Venus book is the only one I read after I was suppose to be asleep, read probably with a flashlight.

I never read H. G. Wells but I know his stuff and I respect him as being one of the first if not the first to write that type of stories. I think they called it speculation fiction back then.
 

Space Cadet chronicles the adventures of the Patrol, an organization charged with "keeping the peace," and through the viewpoint character of a cadet and his friends...first through their training, then as they're assigned duties here and there, till they're about to be commissioned as Patrol officers. Nothing science-fictiony about that? Well, it's in the details...it reflects Heinlein's own experiences as a Navy cadet but is not a precise match for the Navy.

Probably the "Venus Revolt" novel is Between Planets, again covering the adventures of a young man caught up in revolution and interplanetary war---who contributes mightily to it.

Both are part of what are called Heinlein's "juveniles," books written for boys and published by Scribners originally in the forties and fifties. A lot of SF readers got their start in SF through them---me, for one---and, though largely dated through both events and garnered knowledge, are still worth a look.