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
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.
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 envy you for having such a smart teacher.
If I’m right.
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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.
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.