When I was 11 I was attracted to the cover of a book that showed some boats sailing on a terraformed Mars. Reading Blue Mars, the final book in the series, at

When I was 11 I was attracted to the cover of a book that showed some boats sailing on a terraformed Mars. Reading Blue Mars, the final book in the series, at age 11 totally blew my mind. Not only was I already scientifically inclined, so Sax's explanations of the world and descriptions of materials science really expanded my 'scope of the possible' (even if a bunch of the high tech stuff was hand wavy), this book also contained their constitutional convention which rolls on for a whole bunch of pages about the different government systems and some of the impact these power structures can have. At 11 I had no conception of what an anarchist is or socialist or communist was (The wall had fallen 7 years earlier and China was a flea bite) but it populated my 'potential space' of how all these words and concepts I barely understood were related to each other, which made it a hell of a lot easier later in life to have some grounding in which they had been discussed