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
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.
I never would have put Pern into ‘science fiction’ myself.
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.
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.
