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Assuming I can be there (as my head fills with mucus), this Tuesday we'll be discussing our recommendations for good speculative fiction.
What I recommend depends on whether someone wants their mind blown or not.
I started reading SF pretty early. Can't say how early, exactly, but probably either nine or ten. (How I know this involves remembering that I read my brother's copy of The Early Asimov while on vacation in our family trailer, and we got rid of that in '74 or so. So, probably 9 or so.)
The process of getting my mind blown was gradual, and it owes a lot to the Science Fiction Book Club. It started with the stuff in the first three Hugo Winners anthologies (published in two book club volumes). Some of that (like Fritz Leiber's "Ship of Shadows" and Richard Lupoff's "With the Bent-Fin Boomer Boys on Little Old N'Alabama") challenged my ideas about what good prose looked like: They were the first things I'd read that really bent the english language so strenuously to the will of the writer that you had to work to recognize it. Tiptree's "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" (I think it was in volume 3) haunted me. (I regard it as the first cyberpunk story. But that's another point for another time.)
But then I progressed rapidly to the really hard stuff: the massive Harlan Ellison-edited Again, Dangerous Visions, again in an SF Book Club edition, which challenged assumptions at every turn and half-turn: Not just about what constituted good writing, but about proper subjects for a young boy to be reading; about sexuality, as several of the stories included frank depictions of sex both straight and gay; and even about what, exactly, was this thing called "science fiction."
It was the quintessence of "speculative fiction", turned around and run back through a rack of weeds, like pure grain spirits turned into gin.
I devoured it, bulling through even when I didn't like what I was reading because it all promised to unlock secrets: Not just about things, or technology, or the future, but about the nature of the world. It spoke to a sense I'd been cultivating for a long time that maybe, just maybe, I and everyone I knew was sitting on a lab table somewhere imagining the whole damn thing. (I first started having that fantasy when I was in second grade. My brother Glen thinks it came from watching too much Star Trek.)
I acquired the first DV volume as soon as I could scrape together the money, but it wasn't as exciting for me as the second. Because, well, the second was just wilder: It was all people who had everything to gain by just letting it all hang out.
You don't see so much of that in the current generation, but you do still see it. There's no real place for it in the Big 3; it's a thing for the slicks, or for anthologies, or for more marginal publications, but the Big 3 are pretty conservative, for the most part. Nick diChario's The Valley of Day-Glo has some of that same spirit of inventiveness, and I'm sure it has something to do with Nick coming of age into SF about the same time as me. (Maybe a tiny bit later, but that stuff was still on the bookstore racks.)