this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
299 points (98.4% liked)

Science Fiction

13420 readers
25 users here now

Welcome to /c/ScienceFiction

December book club canceled. Short stories instead!

We are a community for discussing all things Science Fiction. We want this to be a place for members to discuss and share everything they love about Science Fiction, whether that be books, movies, TV shows and more. Please feel free to take part and help our community grow.

  1. Be civil: disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally insult others.
  2. Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, ableist, or advocating violence will be removed.
  3. Spam, self promotion, trolling, and bots are not allowed
  4. Put (Spoilers) in the title of your post if you anticipate spoilers.
  5. Please use spoiler tags whenever commenting a spoiler in a non-spoiler thread.

Lemmy World Rules

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
299
Sci-fi books are rare in school even though they help kids better understand science (theconversation.com)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
34 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I'm just guessing here, but it is probably easier to get kids into Fantasy. Tolkien was great then and it is just as great now to get into Fantasy. SciFi on the other hand is always somewhat grounded in the technology of its time. While I really like this, I do think to get into the genre you need something more recent and therefore more grounded in tech you know, which means libraries would have to swap their inventory more often. I'd imagine it's really off-putting for a kid if their futuristic novel suddenly has an CTR display which they may have not even seen before.