In 1981 I was in 10th grade. In 1990 I was married. That’s a lot of change in 10 years. From childhood to adulthood.
In the early part of that decade I got much of my science fiction from movies and from gaming. I did do some reading. In 10th grade I began playing Traveller, which was really the first science fiction roleplaying game. I know there was at least one that probably preceded it, but Traveller was the first of any real consequence. This was of course in the middle of the original Star Wars trilogy releases, so a lot of our games mirrored a very Star Wars kind of approach.
There were a number of SF authors very popular at the time that our group read. The Well World series by Jack L. Chalker was always visible in the book stores and had very engaging cover art. We read those and our Traveller characters visited the Well World. A couple of years ago I revisited the first book, Midnight at the Well of Souls. It is very imaginative but horribly written. I can see why 10th graders would have loved it. Reading it again was OK. Then I tried reading the next one, Exiles at the Well of Souls. I got maybe twenty pages in and had to stop. HORRIBLE. The prose is just ghastly. There is some really terrible offensive stuff about an overweight teenage girl character. It’s just so awful. Sometime revisiting books you thought were great as a teen is not the way to go.
Alan Dean Foster was another very popular author at the time. I read some of his Pip and Flinx novels, set in his Humanx Commonwealth universe. These are enjoyable SF adventure tales. Foster is a much better writer than Chalker. A workhorse. Many of the novelizations of SF movies over the years were written by him. Again, these character driven adventure novels are great inspiration for SF roleplaying games, and I have it on my current list to explore more of his novels set in the Commonwealth. They may not blow my mind, but they will be entertaining an fun.
My college years from 1983 to 1987 did not include much, if any, SF reading, which is really weird when I think back on it. I am sure that’s when I read Dune for the first time. Most of my SF from those years was from movies.
After graduating from college I went back into SF reading. I read some of Heinlein’s more well-known books. I read many H.G. Wells novels, Asimov’s Foundation series, as well as other classics. Foundation blew me away. I feel like it was one of the first “big idea” SF novels I read. I read a lot of Arthur C. Clarke in those days as well, and enjoyed those. To this day the books in Clarke’s Space Odyssey series are some of my favorite novels.
By the end of the 1980s I wouldn’t say I was “well-read” as an SF reader, but I was getting a good base. I think I still am.