A Life With SF

While at secondary school ("high school") in the 1960's, I:

liked men on horseback but preferred men in spacesuits;

bought sf paperbacks and borrowed hardbacks from a Library;

twice found a hardback sequel to a paperback in a Library;

put several authors, although not yet Poul Anderson, on a "must read" list;

was very impressed by Heinlein's Orphans Of The Sky as being set in a completely different kind of environment and did not yet know that it was part of a series;

read Anderson's "The Game of Glory" in the British reprint edition of Venture Science Fiction and did not yet know either that this story was part of a Dominic Flandry series or that that series was part of a future history series;

learned that Merseians had existed in the Polesotechnic League period by reading a reader's letter in an sf mag;

thought of "The Game of Glory" and James Blish's "Beep" as space secret service stories;

learned that the future would be different from the present by reading Guardians Of Time, Twilight World and sf in general;

in particular, knew that Great Powers grow, then decline;

imagined an sf film entitled The Green Fields Of Earth with an appropriate theme song and then saw Heinlein's The Green Hills Of Earth (that is the order in which this happened in my memory).

The "must read" list was revised later.