When I was a little kid we would take car trips to visit my grandparents, and my father would borrow books on tape from the library. He borrowed Asimov's "I, Robot", which if you haven't read it is basically "House, M.D." except that instead of people you have robots and instead of Dr. House you have a pair of underpaid robot repairmen. It didn't introduce any concepts of rationality directly, but in the book the heroes won by figuring things out, rather than by being strong or passionate or morally correct. It made figuring things out cool, and it turns out that if you want to figure things out, you use rationality.