When I was in the Air Force and transferred to Hickam AFB in Hawaii they shipped us over there on a MAC cargo plane modified to carry passengers if you can image what that would be like. The pilot invited anyone interested to come up to the cockpit and watch the "action" going on up there. Can you see that happening today? But anyway, I went up to check it out. The pilot was sitting in his seat reading a book and the co-pilot was reading the newspaper.
I've heard it said that flying a plane is hours of boredom interspersed with moments of sheer terror. I witnessed some of the hours of boredom but luckily didn't see any of the sheer terror.

Isaac Asimov was by far my favorite Sci Fi author. I loved how he did the amazing trick of taking two distinctly separate story lines...The foundation series and the Robot series and over time and a lot of books, brought them to meet. It was brilliant the way he slowly curved the stories about R.Daneel Olivaw and the descendants of Hari Selden's Foundation to meet in the wrap-up to both series. He also wrote my favorite all-time short sci-fi story, "The Last Question." It appeared in an anthology called Nine Tomorrows.

But what ran a close second to Asimov was the series of books by E.E. "Doc" Smith, the Lensman series. They were space opera that would out Star Wars'd Star Wars. The first book, Triplanetary set up the battle between good and evil that would be the common thread that ran through the entire series. Then, in true space opera fashion, the ensuing battles got bigger and more elaborate until entire planets were being used as weapons, popping in and out of sub-space. I think that if it hadn't been for science fiction, I might never have read anything as a kid.