My first science fiction reading was this book. Actually, this very book. My dad had it — I think he was taking a science fiction class at a university? If I am lucky, I actually asked permission to borrow the book and he said I could keep it. More like, I borrowed it to read and it never got back to him. Sorry, Dad!
While not all these stories have held up over time, and they were written in a very different cultural time, there is some pretty impressive ideas from the very early days of science fiction.