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

  • @PsychedSy
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    29 months ago

    Where would you put something like A Scanner Darkly?

    • @[email protected]
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      fedilink
      29 months ago

      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.

      • @PsychedSy
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        39 months ago

        Fair enough. Philip K Dick falls into sci-fi, but a lot of his work isn’t really about the sci-fi aspects.