this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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Science Fiction

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Lemmy World Rules

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Sci-fi books are rare in school even though they help kids better understand science (theconversation.com)
submitted 11 months ago by ikidd@lemmy.world to c/sciencefiction@lemmy.world
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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

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[–] photonic_sorcerer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 22 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Thavron@lemmy.ca 18 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Honestly, there's a lot of Sci-Fi that would fall under that term about now.

[–] photonic_sorcerer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 11 months ago

Hell yes. Asimov's Foundation, Herbert's Dune, there's so much to choose from.

[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 9 points 11 months ago

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."