I can tell you that you should explore the roots of speculative fiction and what it means. For example, here are the novels that we read in my class(which was admittedly a college-level course).

Pilgrim's Progress (John Bunyan)
The Invisible Man (Wells)
The Hobbit (Tolkien) - Whatever you do, don't try to do so thoroughly. The Hobbit alone is a lot of material.
The Neverending Story (Michael Ende) - HIGHLY recommend this one.
Divine Right's Trip (Gurney Norman) - This was an excellent book that I still reference today, but is probably the first one on this list that I'd drop.
Neuromancer (Gibson)

We also covered numerous short stories. A few of the more memorable ones:

The Cold Equations (Tom Godwin) - Excellent, if dated. there's a film of it, as well, but it added a lot of side material.
The Celestial Railroad (Hawthorne) - Highly recommended after Pilgrim's Progress.
The Last Question (Asimov) - Required reading.

Heinlein is also an excellent choice, though we didn't cover it in my class.

Brain dead simple. You're given the option to overwrite, or to archive the old system and try to keep your data, which works 95% of the time from what I hear. I didn't have any problems with it either. You should still back up critical documents and such, but that's SOP for an upgrade, right?