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.
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.
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.
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.
While it is not hard SciFi, consider “Flowers for Algernon” for the list.
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.
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.
My school library’s copy of hitchhiker’s guide started my love for science fiction.
