The golden age of science fiction hit me squarely at thirteen. I can blame that squarely on my father and my friend Michael. My father has been reading SF since long before I was born and always left those tempting two-week library books lying around where I could kidnap them. I usually let him have a go at them first. Unless they were Pern, or Brooks, or ... well, I had low tastes then. My friend Michael handed me my first fantasy trilogy at the tender age of thirteen. I've never thanked him properly.

I started with the Xanth series. I read my way through Incarnations of Immortality too. I liked Piers Anthony, even if his books did get awfully formulaic. My all time favorite (which had its heyday at age fifteen) would have to have been The Caterpillar's Question which Anthony wrote with Philip Jose Farmer. When I was fifteen I thought Tappy was a really interesting protagonist, especially given that she had to be artificially aged in the course of the book (in order to save the world, natch).

I also read Farmer's Riverworld series around that time. I really liked the fact that Alice Pleasance Liddel was in it, even though she was radically different than I had imagined her (I found this to be an ongoing theme with Farmer's women, which is what inevitably steered me away from Farmer and toward authors like Geoff Ryman).

From there I read pretty much anything I could get my hands on, be it science fiction or fantasy, or mainstream. Most of this is concurrent with what I was reading on the previous page. Favorite books and authors were a wide swath, from Anne Rice to Jackie Collins to Victor Hugo. I admit. I was a consumer whore.

Even now, my head can still be turned by a popular novel, provided it has the qualities I'm seeking. Generally though, I play the waiting game, since paperbacks are easier to store in the ever-crowded bookcase.

Around this time I also discovered the great staple of my youth, Bordertown. I regret that writing that is probably making at least one contemporary friend feel old, and I'm sure that if Emma Bull or Will Shetterly ever stumble across this site, that it will regrettably have the same effect. However, it was a big influence, and I still go back to visit the full-length novels. I have had a weakness for short story collections since I was thirteen or so and my father brought home the annual Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Collection. I owe a lot of my love for fantasy to Terri Windling and my appreciation, and occasional cowering terror of horror as a genre, to Ellen Datlow.

I also had a cycle of filching and returning my father's SF for years before it occurred to me that I could return my ill-gotten fiction and buy some of my own Christopher Cerf and Ben Bova anthologies.