I got interested in SF because the librarian in my elementary was a SF lover. There were racks of paperbacks that I gobbled up and it’s stuck with me for decades since. It makes me sad to think that kids don’t have the same chance I did to get interested at an early age in the most imaginative genre of fiction. We all need to do our part to pass it on.
What are your suggestions for getting young people interested in science fiction?
A few I remember from that time:
Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom series
Heinlein’s juveniles like Podkayne of Mars and Have Spacesuit, Will Travel
McCaffery’s Dragonriders of Pern
Niven’s Known Space books
I would not say scifi books help people better understand science. Rather, it cultivates an interest in science.
Asimov wrote some of his sci-fi specifically to explain scientific concepts and he’s not the only one.
I guess it depends on the book? There are many sci-fi books that explore the practical aspects and the science to at least some extent.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be hard science, if it involves critical thinking and it introduces people to certain fields it can be good enough.
Also, it might make some concepts from science more familiar because you read this in a book. It might be part of a technobabble, but I can imagine the reality of it being more approachable if you had some contact with it.
Teachers should be reading scifi with their classes. Classic literature is important too, but scifi can open up a child’s mind to so many new ideas that they’d never be exposed to otherwise.
Honestly, there’s a lot of Sci-Fi that would fall under that term about now.
Hell yes. Asimov’s Foundation, Herbert’s Dune, there’s so much to choose from.
Especially high school literature class really distorted my view of reading entirely. EVERY SINGLE THING we read was at least 100 years old, some of it over a thousand what with Beowulf and the Canterbury Tales. It has this “nothing new is worthy” message to it. My grandmother handed me a book that was a mystery murder plot set in a slightly futuristic theme park and the teenage daughter character had an mp3 player in it (this was in like 2006) and I was like “Oh, right, books are allowed to be new.”
One of the first books I can remember reading was a Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle. The concept of tesseracts totally blew my young mind.
For me it was And He Built a Crooked House.
A Wrinkle in Time and The Green Book were my first introduction to Sci-Fi books, but I was well versed in movie sci-fi by then.
Absolutely loved that book as a kid. I think trying to understand tesseracts turned into a love of math, or at least brought it out for me, too. Great book, great example of how SF can spark a child’s interest in science.
While it is not hard SciFi, consider “Flowers for Algernon” for the list.
I am pretty sure I read that in school, maybe in middle school. I’ve read it since, and the movie they adapted it into, Charly, is pretty good, but I have a vague but solid memory of reading it for a class.
I envy you for having such a smart teacher.
If I’m right.
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We read it for English in grade 10. Not sure if that was just because it was an advance placement class where our teacher had more discretion on the materials, or if everyone read it at that grade.
I’m a little curious. Why don’t you say flowers for Algernon isn’t hard sci-fi?
I would consider it reasonably hard- the science behind it is not unrealistic. Sure, there’s some aspects that are a bit, well off.
And sure, there’s no space ships or aliens.
But at the core of it, it’s a question of how science changes things- and it’s a beautiful peace.
I’m a little curious. Why don’t you say flowers for Algernon isn’t hard sci-fi?
The book is focused of the social and psychological aspects. The science itself is barely visible and only in the background. But that’s my opinion, yours may vary.
Where would you put something like A Scanner Darkly?
I had to look it up - I’ve read a translated version of it (Der Dunkle Schirm), so the title didn’t ring a bell. Apart from being placed in a future and those kind-of-camo-suits there was not much SciFi in that IIRC. But it had no appeal to me, anyway, as it was mostly about drug abuse.
Fair enough. Philip K Dick falls into sci-fi, but a lot of his work isn’t really about the sci-fi aspects.
My school library’s copy of hitchhiker’s guide started my love for science fiction.
My grade 8 teacher forced the entire class to read the first Dragonriders of Pern book. I then proceedes to devoure all of the rest, until her son took over and ruined it all.
No wonder sci-fi books are rare you keep eating them!
I have since switch to ebooks. Better roughage.
lots of sci-fi has the disadvantage of being written by nerds pretending to be writers. A good amount of sci-fi books is interesting premises ruined by boring narrative subplots, dry writing, a healthy dashing of futuristic technobabble, and philosophical/political debate about the future of humanity as it advances technology colonizes and interacts with aliens or whatever. If you’re the right age and kind of person to enjoy that kind of thing its great but lets not clutch our pearls at 6th graders not being particularly interested in The Dark Forest trilogy.
Bro I want more technical stuff and philosophy in my sci fi and less romance and chatter
I got into sci-fi because my dad had a giant shelf with nothing but pulp sci-fi books, mostly from the 60’s and 70’s. Most of them were not very hard sci-fi, but I loved reading through all of them as a little kid. They triggered my imagination, especially the ones that came with little maps in the back where I could follow the story’s progress. Jack Vance’s Planet of Adventure was one of my very favorites, full of… well… adventure (it delivers exactly what it says :)
Most of them were already ridiculously dated, but it was the idea of traveling through space, exploring new places with strange and exciting cultures that made them so appealing to me.
I tried to find more books in the high-school library when I got older but was disappointed to find almost nothing outside of the traditional literature like H.G. Wells. It did motivate me to get into fantasy literature like Beowulf and LOTR to fill out my reading list for English class (English is not my native tongue), anything to get out of reading “proper” literature.Anyway, if you want to recommend science fiction to young people, keep it simple and trigger the imagination. The hard stuff can come later.
I was already very interested in SF (my much older brother and I watched Star Trek together from the time I was a toddler), but my high school had an SF Lit class and it was such a great class. Mystery Lit was fun too.
Alan Dean Foster’s series Pip and Flinx and his Icerigger and Commonwealth Founding trilogies.
George Martin’s “Tuf Voyaging”.
Harry Harrison’s “Deathworld” and “To the Stars” trilogies.
Frank Herbert’s “Whipping Star” and “The Dosadi Experiment”.
Lem’s Eden was one of my favourites as a kid and works on many levels:
- Cool action and adventuring on a mysterious alien planet.
- Plenty of gadgetry of both human and alien origin. Including some of the earliest description of nanotechnology.
- Social commentary about interfering with an another civilization, oppression, totalitarianism and control of information.
Niven’s Known Space series, especially short stories like Neutron Star.
Clifford D. Simak has two fabulous stories, They Walked Like Men and The Goblin Reservation which have the perfect mix of action, humour and societal commentary. It’s hard to beat the latters main cast consisting of a university professor searching for dragons, a neanterthal man, a girl with a pet sabertooth tiger and a ghost with amnesia. Hilarity is quaranteed to ensue.
I never would have put Pern into ‘science fiction’ myself.
I’m just guessing here, but it is probably easier to get kids into Fantasy. Tolkien was great then and it is just as great now to get into Fantasy. SciFi on the other hand is always somewhat grounded in the technology of its time. While I really like this, I do think to get into the genre you need something more recent and therefore more grounded in tech you know, which means libraries would have to swap their inventory more often. I’d imagine it’s really off-putting for a kid if their futuristic novel suddenly has an CTR display which they may have not even seen before.
Interesting article, the statistics section was quite surprising. I wonder if there were as many fantasy books in school libraries before harry potter came out.
