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

Science Fiction

13726 readers
3 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 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Tenthrow@lemmy.world
299
Sci-fi books are rare in school even though they help kids better understand science (theconversation.com)
submitted 1 year ago by ikidd@lemmy.world to c/sciencefiction@lemmy.world
35 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
[–] FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’m a little curious. Why don’t you say flowers for Algernon isn’t hard sci-fi?

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.

[–] PsychedSy@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Where would you put something like A Scanner Darkly?

[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago

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