Minor correction: Robots and Empire, not Robots of Dawn (the latter I borrowed from the library shortly thereafter; for some reason I always confuse the titles, but not the plots…).

I must have been 6 or 7 years old for my “geek awakening.” I was bored, and bugging my dad for something to do (maybe not explicitly asking for entertainment — I can’t recall at this point — but I’m pretty sure that was his interpretation at least), and so he said something along the lines of “If you need something to do so badly, why don’t you try reading this.” He handed me the book he’d just finished — Robots of Dawn (Asimov) — and the rest was history. I got some weird looks from classmates toting around the gigantic, abridged Asimov books in third grade, though…

I have two pivotal geek moments. First was watching the original Star Trek when I was a kid living in the UK. The second was finding yellowed collections of science fiction stories in my school library (and through those books getting to know a bunch of people who shared my interests). Star Trek was basically what turned me onto science and technology and those books kept it going. Though my parents are both very well educated (and my dad studied engineering for a while) they didn’t have much of part in my emerging geekery (except funding my scifi book addiction and the occasional space-oriented Lego set (in which case I almost never followed the instructions)).