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What's the oldest science fiction or fantasy novel you've ever read? Me I have no clue...I din't read that often (seriously odd for a writer lol)
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Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, or, the New Prometheus. (Not the movie, the original book.) First published in 1818. Though it seems to have some elements out-of-kilter with modern-day SF.
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Fantasy was the common form of literature in ancient history. So the question may as well be what is the oldest book you've read. The Iliad perhaps?
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.
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I never check the dates to know what came out when. But likely the oldest I have read is something Bradbury or Hienlein. I know not that old.
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Some of those mentioned are older-Gilgamesh and Frankenstein- than these but I believe these writers were before Heinlein etc. Well, Doc Smith was I think.
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).]
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The oldest SF book I read though, I have no idea when it was written but probably some time in the 1960s. I say oldest but I should have said the first SF book. It wouldn't be older than E. E. Doc Smith, or someone else I can't recall right now but was a contemporary of Smith. Anyway, the book's title was "The Programed Man" and I can't recall who wrote it and I haven't seen it since. But I can still remember what it was about.
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I've read some bradbury, vonnegut, and what i really cut my sf teeth on was early golden age Heinlein and Asimov.
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...)
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What came after Frankenstein in my reading habits, in order of extreme age? I've read a lot of Verne, a lot of Wells...Karl Capek's R. U. R., which gave us English speakers the word "robot"...the aforementioned E. E. "Doc" Smith's The Skylark of Space...the first Buck Rogers story, which was in the same issue of Amazing in August, 1928...some Edmond Hamilton of that vintage...the stories collected in The Early [Jack] Williamson...some Lovecraft...Asimov's Before the Golden Age anthology, consisting of his favorite stories from the 1930s...well, I guess, a fair amount.
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...)
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Oops, Robert with that "Space Cadet" reference you tweaked my memory. Is that that series about the three cadets that became friends and started saving the universe on a regular bases? or at least their part of it.
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.
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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 that was a religion class, not a lit one. 
