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
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.
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.”
