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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It runs the world by printing out business letters (and checks) that hire people to expand itself.

https://www.worldswithoutend.c...
"Chester W. Chester IV, sole surviving heir of eccentric millionaire-inventor Chester W. Chester I, has entered into his inheritance: a semi-moribund circus; a white elephant of a run-down neo-Victorian mansion furnished with such hot items as TV sets shaped like crouching vultures; the old gentleman's final invention, a mammoth computer whose sole value seems to be as scrap metal; and one more thing--a million credits in back taxes. Either he comes up with the million credits, or it's up-the-river for Chester for a long, long time. That's why Chester is desperate enough to use the Generalized Nonlinear Extrapolator (Genie for short) to perpetrate one of the biggest entertainment scams of all time--The Great Time Machine Hoax."

I enjoyed that novel a lot and read it multiple times -- especially for the aspects of learning and training to become a more capable person (if maybe not a wiser and more compassionate one depending what you study).

Come on. Isn't this rather old news, even for SlashDot?

We've had him listed as the 2012 Grand Master winner for several months already and Scalzi blogged about it in mid December.

'Red Thunder' is a relatively recent series of sci-fi novels by John Varley, written with a young adult audience in mind. Varley avoids the adult content of his usual works -- there's even a character in the book who forbids the children from swearing -- so I'm sure it could pass muster for middle school.

The plot of the books is rich in science content and wonder. An autistic inventor and his brother discover a new power source, and a gang of young kids decide to build a rocket using that power so that they can be the first on Mars. There's a lot of opportunity in this book for teaching kids about air pressure, spaceflight, and the logistics of building a (small) space program.

Here's a link to a bunch of reviews of Red Thunder. I have not yet red the sequels so I can't vouch for whether they'd be okay for middle school students, but I believe Varley intended the entire series to be teenager-friendly. (You might want to warn them that the rest of Varley's books can be very adult, however.)

The realization that i hadn't heard of three of those books before and might never have read them caused me to go back and review the complete list of Hugo awards and Nebula awards for best novel.

Check out this website

https://www.worldswithoutend.com/

does an amazing job of showing what past nominees/winners are and whether or not you'd like them

Yes

Ditto for The Space Merchants", by Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth. Unforgettable.