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Sci-Fi Books For Pre-Teens?
o2binbuzios writes "I have two pre-teen boys who are avid readers, and I am going through my mental catalog for great sci-fi & fantasy books for them. What are some of the classics (and maybe new additions to the classics) that would be great for them to read? I am asking because some of the 'straight-up' classics I remember actually seem kind of dark & cynical for younger readers. Starship Troopers and some of the other Heinlein are definitely darker and more political than I remember... Foundation Trilogy and psycho-history maybe too dry. Road-trip reading season is upon us — what are the good reads for the kids in the back seat?"
When I was a kid, I had a lot of fun time reading Journey to the Center of the Earth, from the Earth to the Moon, etc.
Almost anything by Terry Pratchett.
Citizen of the Galaxy, Farmer in the Sky, Have Space Suit will Travel, Starman Jones - all by Heinlein. These are his juveniles and are all good stories, drama and action along with some moralizing about studying hard etc ... I read them as a kid and was hooked. The Larry Niven short stories.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
Anne McCaffery has some good ones, but they are generally dragon & space oriented. Pretty good reads, and there's quite a few in the series.
Orson Scott Card has Ender's Game (and several more in that series). These are definately classic.
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle, and the follow-ups are all very well written, though some of the deeper themes might be a bit above your kids depending on how sharp they are.
CS Lewis' Space Trilogy is excellent, though it gets pretty violent, and might be a bit advanced for pre-teens.
Terry Pratchett's books are funny, but they tend to spoof the politics and happenings of the US and the UK, so your kids might not grasp all the jokes. Much better would be Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the (increasingly misnamed) Hitchhiker's Trilogy (there are five books there).
If you like, you might even start them on JRR Tolkien, which is more fantasy than sci-fi, but definitely a classic. You also have the advantage of the movies once they're done with the books. (Books are better though.)
Those are my picks, and that should be enough reading for at least this summer, if not longer. You can also walk into your local Borders and ask someone. There's tons of great kids books in Sci-Fi...
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Wow, another Bester/"Stars" fan? I thought I was among the five people left in the world who loved this story. I was about 12-13 at the time I read it for the first of perhaps half-a-dozen times. Now that you've reminded me about it, I'll have to read it again. It's in my now almost fifty-year-old copy of A Treasury of Great Science Fiction edited by Anthony Boucher which I just found on the bookshelf.
I like many of the Heinlein novels from his early period, particularly the ones that were political in nature. His depiction of an America with politics based on fundamentalist Protestantism seems remarkably prescient since the Reagan years. Once sexuality appears on your childrens' horizons, it might be time to read Stranger in a Strange Land.
I was a pretty devout Catholic as a child and remember the impression Arthur C. Clarke's short story "The Star" made. Like the protagonist in the story, it may have marked the beginning of doubt.
Another author that I loved in my youth was "Andre" Norton, the pen name of Alice Mary Norton. When she started writing SF and fantasy, women were so rare in the profession that she took a man's first name to get published. Looking at her bibliography, I recall reading a number of books that she wrote in the late 1950's and early 1960's.
Finally if your children like fantasy, I strongly recommend Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea Trilogy, another series intended for young readers but with great appeal to adults as well. Le Guin was the daughter of the famous American anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, an influence that's obvious in many of her best works like The Dispossessed.
My wife is the current librarian of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, and there's a Children's Recommended Reading List that the club has been keeping up for some time. There's a lot of stuff on there, and it should offer some guidance.
My dad introduced me to science fiction by bringing home a "kid's" novel one day. I couldn't have been much older than eight or nine. I tore through it as quickly as I could, sneaking a flashlight under the covers to finish it. It was Tom Swift: The City in the Stars. As each new one came out, I'd spend my allowance on it (when I wasn't saving for a Lego set).
I was hooked. I made it through the sixth book in the series before I tumbled to the fact that this wasn't the original series. At that point I became a regular at the library and checked out every Tom Swift book they had. That's how I learned about this "interloan" thing.
I'd never been out of the kid's section before but I noticed that the library had this whole other back section that wasn't nonfiction, and wasn't kid's books. I walked back through it and to my amazement I discovered shelf after shelf full of fiction and a fair number of the books had the letters SF written in Sharpie on a label card on the spine. Magic!
I decided to try out my first "Adult" science fiction novel and I thought robots were just the coolest thing (next to spaceships of course, but all decent science fiction had spaceships in it). Robots of Dawn had just arrived, and since the title sounded cool, I grabbed it from the returns rack. I became a lifelong fan of Isaac Asimov after the first chapter. I went back to the library and dug up as many books by him as I could find, not just his science fiction, but the Ellery Queen stories, his science books, as much as I could find in the library's catalog or through the interloan program.
I began reading back issues of Astounding Science Fiction, Analog, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (IASFM!), and discovered other authors. Many of the story intros or commentaries in anthologies had mentioned this Dune novel, so I decided to check it out. I had to renew it because I couldn't read through it in three weeks (it was 1984, the same year the David Lynch movie was released... I was ten). It was a revelation.
From there, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Silverberg, Heinlein, Simak, Gordon R. Dickson, Phillip K. Dick, Sturgeon, Bradbury, Poul Anderson, Piers Anthony, Douglas Adams, C.J. Cherryh, Kim Stanley Robinson, Spider Robinson, Ursula K. Leguin, Joan D. Vinge, Vernor Vinge, and more, and more. But to understand all of these, I had to get their references, and so I began to dig into Dickens and Melville and Shakespeare. By the time I was in Junior High School, I was more widely read than just about any other kid in school.
Don't sell your kids short thinking they're too young for Asimov. Granted, his writings are a gateway drug.