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
lots of sci-fi has the disadvantage of being written by nerds pretending to be writers. A good amount of sci-fi books is interesting premises ruined by boring narrative subplots, dry writing, a healthy dashing of futuristic technobabble, and philosophical/political debate about the future of humanity as it advances technology colonizes and interacts with aliens or whatever. If you’re the right age and kind of person to enjoy that kind of thing its great but lets not clutch our pearls at 6th graders not being particularly interested in The Dark Forest trilogy.
Bro I want more technical stuff and philosophy in my sci fi and less romance and chatter