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Scientifically Accurate Sci-Fi for High-Schoolers?
Raul654 asks: "A member of my immediate family is a biology teacher at an all-girls high school. For some years, she's been giving her students the option to earn extra credit by reading a science-related book. What scientifically accurate science fiction books would you recommend for high school readers?"
Make them Star Wars comics. Extra credit in an exam for explaining the internal mechanics of a lightsaber.
A full scholarship for anyone who builds a working lightsaber.
Doesn't the fact that it's science fiction mean that it's not going to be scientifically accurate? Maybe you should look in another category like biological thriller; The Hot Zone is widely regarded to be very accurate.
Maybe the King James Version?
David Brin is one of the very rare sci-fi authors out there who actually has the background to deal with hard science and the ability to write compelling characters and plots. He has several award winning books (Hugos, Nebulas, etc.) under his belt, but even his lesser works are good reads. While "Startide Rising" is a classic and an absolute no-brainer, a lesser work like "Glory Season" might hold special interest for an all-girl class. (The book is set on a isolated colony where humans tinkered with biology a little and created a female dominated society, but it's done a bit differently than most other attempts at the same sort of story.)
As well as Brin, and I guess Bear, Benford and Forward (some of the better-known "hard SF" authors around), I recommend Australian writer Greg Egan. Heck he even supplies technical notes to his books on his home page.
Though my favourite Egan works tend to be more philosophical than scientific (eg the short story "Learning To Be Me").
a world in progress...
Red Mars is the first book of a trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson about the settlement and terraforming of Mars. There's some biology there, though I can't vouch for it (not having studied any biology beyond high school); but overall it's just gripping and completely plausible hard sci-fi. There's some stuff in the other two books that might not be appropriate for high-schoolers, depending on your attitude, but I don't recall anything too objectionable in the first one at least.
Check it out. Even if the class doesn't end up using it, if you're a sci-fi fan then it will be time well spent.
The team of Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and sometimes Stephen Barnes have produced several books/series which intelligently use ecological themes.
"Legacy of Heorot" and "Beowulf's Children" (Niven, Pournelle, Barnes) have as their prime villain (villain being defined as an entity whose aims clash with those of the humans) the grendels, a creature native to the planet a colonizing starship has reached. The colonists very sensibly initially occupy a single island which has relatively little native life on it due to a recent natural catastrophe; trouble arises when they become overconfident of their understanding of the local ecology, failing to realize that grendels act as their own alpha predators. By killing the local grendel they have ensured that *all* the local samlon, which would normally have been predated down to what might have been nuisance levels, will mature into grendels... A nice side issue is that one reason for the human failure to see the problem is that the best ecological experts have suffered "ice on the mind", a form of brain damage caused by expanding ice crystals in the brain during their arteficial hibernation - more grist for a biology class.
"The Mote in God's Eye" and "The Gripping Hand" (Niven, Pournelle) explore a world wherein a quirk of biology curses the intelligent aliens with perpetual population explosion, and the resultant atomic wars, runaway pollution and intense resource deficit only make the Darwinian struggle more acute; by the time humans come into contact with them, the Moties are individually and in small kin-groups amazingly more capable than Homo sapiens, but at the same time they are crippled by an inability to see beyond their local self-interest. The physics of the series allows two principal Just-Accept-It items, an instantaneous-jump Faster-Than-Light drive and a universally-absorbent energy field, but even here there are credible limitations on the technoloy; Alderson drives can only jump between points of equal stellar flux, and Langston Fields eventually must dissipate the energy they absorb. What really makes the series especially suitable for your friend's purposes is that the authors' examination of how deep and subtle the effects of breeding patterns on intelligent creatures, including their effect on ethics, has not been equalled in any other SF series I know of.
"Footfall" (Niven, Pournelle) is another First Contact novel, and despite the slight dating afforded by its Cold War milieu still easily one of the best (I like to think of it as an Alternate History in which the USSR survived longer than it did AND we were visited by aliens). As in the first series, no liberties whatsoever have been taken with physics - no FTL drive, nor any FTK communication. As in the second, the best part of the book is seeing how the biological origins of the aliens (and the humans!) informs their thinking, language, decision making, ethics, and of course how they misunderstand each other. The Traveler Fithp are herd animals, you see, and that has all kinds of consequences; for example, when they accept surrender thay think the whole herd has surrendered. What we call individualists they call rogues, i.e. insane, and they are not at all prepared to deal with a race where rogues approach being the norm; a resistance by a few humans is seen as a betrayal by the whole populace. The misunderstandings span large and small. For example, they *really* believe in law and order, including one of the characteristics they (nominally) share with us - they mate for life! It's really a good read, full of fast-paced action as well as some solid philosohical meat.
It's a little unclear whether you are only looking for SF based on biological themes or more general science is good; in either case Niven is the powerhouse of this team, and his solo work abounds with insight into physics (especially astrophysics) and ecology. The Ringworld series ("Ringworld", "The Ringworld Engineers", "Ringworld Throne" and "Ringworld's Children") are mostly cited for the physics of the Rin
But...
Much though I respect Niven and his crowd for their engineering, as pedagogical tools, they are crippled by their handling of human beings. Like Heinlein, but to an even greater degree, that whole cluster of writers is reliably anti-democracy, vastly sexist, and contemptuous of any human worldview but their own. Like Crichton, anybody whose philosophy differs from their male-centric techno-libertarian/protofascist (!)* creed is cowardly, probably homosexual (the horror!) and intellectually bankrupt. Women are sex objects or Heinleinesque cartoon superwomen, usually "coincidentally" extremely young and pretty, etc.
Now, as a male techno-libertarian myself, with my own hyper-cute intellectual superwoman of a girlfriend, I find this stuff really annoying.
Yeah, the Mote books are fascinating and engrossing. But did the only human civilization worthy of respect have to be a Czarist, totalitarian, testosterone fantasyland of uniforms and commands and Very Big Guns?
I have recommended their books before, putting them forward as works like The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, where one must live with the bad to get the good, and alienated those who I recommended them to. Personally, I find myself turning to works like mid-period Brunner or Delany or the Alliance/Union/Compact books of C.J. Cherryh. All of those are just as smart, technologically fascinating, but are simply less, well, adolescent than Niven and his crowd.
Do I feel that your recommendations are wrong? No. But best that we note their failings along with their strengths. And I want to note that, oddly enough, in my experience, the farther Niven veers from current and highly specific technology, the more open-minded his characterizations become. So, predicably, Lucifer's Hammer is terrible, from its pro-fission reactor idiocies to the explicit polemics, while Ringworld acknowledges complexity and even encompasses a bit of witty satire.
* I am well aware of the seeming contradiction of my locution, "techno-libertarian/protofascist". Ain't so. Both states, as seen in their books, are variations on "guys like me must be in charge, everyone else is contemptable". The only difference is that when they are writing about far away worlds, they fantasize about the benevolent despotism that "should" be imposed while in writing about near-term Earth, they retreat to truculent rejection of all government or democracy as self-evident tools of the inferior masses "we" are trying to get free of. Neither, may I note, has the sophistication of the considered and explicit libertarianism of works like the Tom Paine Maru books that try to figure out political approaches that respect all people.
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.