Hey, Nerds!
Aug. 16th, 2013 07:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodyrosemccoyHey, dudes!
My friend the English teacher is trying to figure out what kind of science fiction books to teach to her 9th graders. She is not well-versed in science fiction herself, so she was wondering about my ideas. I came up with the list below. However, as you can probably guess from the list, I'm not really good at gauging age-appropriateness (or, equally important around here, Mormon-appropriateness, which explains a lot of my "dude, there's swear words here" warnings)--I figured I'd give her some broad outlines and she could take it from there. I also am not sure how Classic or Literary she wants them to be, so I included a few just plain fun pieces. I also tried to steer clear of the somewhat more obscure like CJ Cherryh's Chanur Saga or Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books or Poul Anderson's anything--I'd have read them in 9th grade, but probably they wouldn't work for a class. And I know there have got to be more. So! Care to help?
I've got to say, giving brief outlines of books is surprisingly difficult. I wonder how those back-of-the-book writers do it.
Also, I totally forgot to steer her toward Edgar Rice Burroughs and Douglas Adams. God DAMMIT.
Amelia's Sci-Fi For 9th Graders, As Emailed To Her Buddy
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is widely considered to be the first science fiction novel. It's a lot different from the book--the monster can talk, and is a sympathetic character. It deals a lot with issues of responsibility toward what you create, and the definitions of humanity.
---
Anything by John Scalzi - Scalzi is one of my favorite science fiction writers. His books are fun romps with a lot of interesting insights. They are, however, full of swearing.
-I'd steer clear of Old Man's War; it's got a slightly graphic sex scene. Its sequel, The Ghost Brigades, works as a standalone. That one has implied sex acts, but they aren't really described in detail. The Ghost Brigades is about a genetically engineered super soldier who is grown in a vat and is "born" as an adult; most of the soldiers are created specifically to fight aliens. Jared, however, has another purpose--they cloned him from a traitor to humanity, and they tried to copy the traitor's consciousness into Jared in order to understand what the traitor will do next. Jared is thus is struggling with trying to figure out his identity and making complex moral choices.
-Redshirts is brilliant, but it also might make the most sense to Star Trek fans. It follows the adventures of a bunch of starship "redshirts"--the nameless guys who die to prove how serious the situation is--who start to wonder why they tend to get killed so much.
-Agent to the Stars might be your best bet from Scalzi. It's told from the point of view of a Hollywood agent who is contacted by aliens: they want to hire him. They want to make peaceful contact with Earth, but the problem is that they are super ugly--so they decide they need an agent to sell themselves to the Earth public with the help of an agent.
---
While it's not quite technological science fiction, Diane Duane has a wonderful YA series beginning with So You Want To Be A Wizard. It follows Nita, her sister Dairine, and Nita's friend Kit, contemporary New York teenagers who don't fit in. They are all nerdy and get bullied a lot. However, in the library one day they receive an offer from the Powers That Be who run the universe: they are invited to become wizards, who battle the evil Lone Power (basically the devil) who invented death and is always trying to increase entropy and chaos. The first book has Nita and Kit making friends with a sentient white hole (like a black hole, but smaller), then going to an alternate New York City to recover a magical book of spells while battling by man-eating helicopters and killer taxi cabs. The later books have them turning into whales, zapping across the galaxy with magic computers, etc..
Note that the first one was written in 1982, so it's a little dated. However, Duane has recently released updated "Millennium Editions" as ebooks, which you can get at her site. If everyone in your class gets an iPad, that might work out well. I usually don't like it when authors "update" their books, but in this case I like it because Duane has such fun with modern technology.
There's also a spinoff series, starting with The Book Of Night With Moon, which is about cat wizards who work at Grand Central Station. At one point in that one Luciano Pavarotti gets attacked by dinosaurs. I read it in 9th grade, but I'm not sure if the kids would like it.
All of the books deal with impressive concepts of creation and mythology, as well as personal choices and the constant battle between good and evil. They also gave kids some really relatable teenage heroes learning to be wizards--fifteen years before Harry Potter. (I particularly like that, unlike with Harry Potter, they integrate their modern lives with their wizardry--you get magical DVD players and iPods and Star Wars references.)
---
Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. You know how I feel about it (hee hee!), but it does seem popular with 9th-graders.
---
Mothership by Martin Leicht and Isla Neal is a fun little YA book. The main character, Elvie, is 16 years old, pregnant, and living on a spaceship that is a home for expecting teen mothers. Just before she's due, aliens attack the ship and she and the other teen girls have to get through the ship to the escape hatches before the ship crashes to Earth. It's not fancy, but it's a lot of fun.
---
Similarly, Above World by Jenn Reese is a new YA series set in a post-apocalyptic future. In order to survive in the extreme places of Earth, humans have combined genetic engineering and cybernetics to turn themselves into mythical beings, like mermaids (called Kampii), centaurs, winged people, etc.. Each of these groups have splintered off, but now a mad scientist is threatening the communities. It is up to Aluna--a Kampii who still has legs, since she has not grown her tail yet--and her friends to unite the different peoples to save themselves.
Note that it is the first of a series. The second book, Mirage, is out already; the next one is due out soon.
---
One of my favorite short stories is "To Serve Man" by Damon Knight. It's a classic Golden Age scifi story. Aliens make contact with Earth and SEEM to be completely altruistic--stopping war, feeding the hungry, etc. But one guy is a little suspicious of their generosity, and he suspects the answers lie in a book all the aliens seem to be carrying around. It's got an excellent last line.
---
Ray Bradbury writes a lot of great classic science fiction. You probably know about Fahrenheit 451, which everyone thinks is about censorship but is actually about how books bring people together while technology alienates us from each other. (I could argue with Bradbury about that all day.) I prefer his short stories, which manage to give a really good creepy dread feeling (they rarely turn out well for the characters). One of my favorites of those is "The Veldt," which is a diatribe against TV--a father starts to get a little worried that his kids are spending all their time in the "nursery," a room that will create whatever environment the kids want. The kids, whose every whim is fulfilled instantly, become spoiled and demanding and finally terrifying.
Also there's his Martian Chronicles, which is presented as a novel but was originally a bunch of different short stories. It gives a lot of vignettes about human settlement on Mars.
---
Finally, I think you'd LOVE There and Back Again by Pat Murphy (sometimes it appears under her pseudonym, Max Merriwell, but it's the same book). It's a reimagining of The Hobbit as a crazy space adventure. It is AWESOME. Bailey Beldon, a "norbit" (pretty much a space hobbit) is content to live in his asteroid in Earth's asteroid belt and never have adventures. Then a family of clone women show up on his asteroid along with the strange wanderer Gitana to pick up a message pod of theirs he'd found--and the next thing he knows, he's joined them on an adventure across the galaxy very reminiscent of The Hobbit--there is a Riddles in the Dark scene, except instead of under a mountain full of orcs it's set in the belly of a spaceship filled with evil brain-stealing space marauders. Mirkwood Forest is replaced by a nebula (though it's still full of spiders); the Rivendell analogue is a huge space station; the Ring is a complex little device that allows one to step outside of time; and in the end there's a battle with a huge robot dragon.
Murphy makes a conscious effort to follow the Joseph Campbell path of the hero (she even mentions it in an author's note). It's really nice to have some female characters in the mix, too. Note that there are a few references to drug use (they drink a sort of drugged alcohol to get "buzzed" at one point). Probably not a big deal, but again, I'm not sure what the parents would say.
Unfortunately, it looks like the book is out of print--but it's readily available used, for pretty good prices.
---
My sister adds a few:
Scott Westerfield's Uglies is the first in a series of dystopian YA novels. I haven't read them, but they resonate well with teenagers. It's a society where you have to have a radical physical alteration to become "pretty" before you get accepted into society.
---
James Dashner's Mazerunner is another one I haven't read, but it's popular too. And he's a local author, which is a plus!
---
The Fifth Wave by Rick Yancey - aliens have taken over, and you don't know who to trust!
---
Of course, Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games trilogy is quite popular right now--more dystopian future fiction. Aside from an exciting adventure, it's an interesting commentary on our fascination with media violence and the modern divide between the haves and the have-nots.
So! That's my list! Anyone want to add any?
ETA: Dammit, also forgot Ringworld! I have no idea how 9th graders would react to that one.
My friend the English teacher is trying to figure out what kind of science fiction books to teach to her 9th graders. She is not well-versed in science fiction herself, so she was wondering about my ideas. I came up with the list below. However, as you can probably guess from the list, I'm not really good at gauging age-appropriateness (or, equally important around here, Mormon-appropriateness, which explains a lot of my "dude, there's swear words here" warnings)--I figured I'd give her some broad outlines and she could take it from there. I also am not sure how Classic or Literary she wants them to be, so I included a few just plain fun pieces. I also tried to steer clear of the somewhat more obscure like CJ Cherryh's Chanur Saga or Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books or Poul Anderson's anything--I'd have read them in 9th grade, but probably they wouldn't work for a class. And I know there have got to be more. So! Care to help?
I've got to say, giving brief outlines of books is surprisingly difficult. I wonder how those back-of-the-book writers do it.
Also, I totally forgot to steer her toward Edgar Rice Burroughs and Douglas Adams. God DAMMIT.
Amelia's Sci-Fi For 9th Graders, As Emailed To Her Buddy
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is widely considered to be the first science fiction novel. It's a lot different from the book--the monster can talk, and is a sympathetic character. It deals a lot with issues of responsibility toward what you create, and the definitions of humanity.
---
Anything by John Scalzi - Scalzi is one of my favorite science fiction writers. His books are fun romps with a lot of interesting insights. They are, however, full of swearing.
-I'd steer clear of Old Man's War; it's got a slightly graphic sex scene. Its sequel, The Ghost Brigades, works as a standalone. That one has implied sex acts, but they aren't really described in detail. The Ghost Brigades is about a genetically engineered super soldier who is grown in a vat and is "born" as an adult; most of the soldiers are created specifically to fight aliens. Jared, however, has another purpose--they cloned him from a traitor to humanity, and they tried to copy the traitor's consciousness into Jared in order to understand what the traitor will do next. Jared is thus is struggling with trying to figure out his identity and making complex moral choices.
-Redshirts is brilliant, but it also might make the most sense to Star Trek fans. It follows the adventures of a bunch of starship "redshirts"--the nameless guys who die to prove how serious the situation is--who start to wonder why they tend to get killed so much.
-Agent to the Stars might be your best bet from Scalzi. It's told from the point of view of a Hollywood agent who is contacted by aliens: they want to hire him. They want to make peaceful contact with Earth, but the problem is that they are super ugly--so they decide they need an agent to sell themselves to the Earth public with the help of an agent.
---
While it's not quite technological science fiction, Diane Duane has a wonderful YA series beginning with So You Want To Be A Wizard. It follows Nita, her sister Dairine, and Nita's friend Kit, contemporary New York teenagers who don't fit in. They are all nerdy and get bullied a lot. However, in the library one day they receive an offer from the Powers That Be who run the universe: they are invited to become wizards, who battle the evil Lone Power (basically the devil) who invented death and is always trying to increase entropy and chaos. The first book has Nita and Kit making friends with a sentient white hole (like a black hole, but smaller), then going to an alternate New York City to recover a magical book of spells while battling by man-eating helicopters and killer taxi cabs. The later books have them turning into whales, zapping across the galaxy with magic computers, etc..
Note that the first one was written in 1982, so it's a little dated. However, Duane has recently released updated "Millennium Editions" as ebooks, which you can get at her site. If everyone in your class gets an iPad, that might work out well. I usually don't like it when authors "update" their books, but in this case I like it because Duane has such fun with modern technology.
There's also a spinoff series, starting with The Book Of Night With Moon, which is about cat wizards who work at Grand Central Station. At one point in that one Luciano Pavarotti gets attacked by dinosaurs. I read it in 9th grade, but I'm not sure if the kids would like it.
All of the books deal with impressive concepts of creation and mythology, as well as personal choices and the constant battle between good and evil. They also gave kids some really relatable teenage heroes learning to be wizards--fifteen years before Harry Potter. (I particularly like that, unlike with Harry Potter, they integrate their modern lives with their wizardry--you get magical DVD players and iPods and Star Wars references.)
---
Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. You know how I feel about it (hee hee!), but it does seem popular with 9th-graders.
---
Mothership by Martin Leicht and Isla Neal is a fun little YA book. The main character, Elvie, is 16 years old, pregnant, and living on a spaceship that is a home for expecting teen mothers. Just before she's due, aliens attack the ship and she and the other teen girls have to get through the ship to the escape hatches before the ship crashes to Earth. It's not fancy, but it's a lot of fun.
---
Similarly, Above World by Jenn Reese is a new YA series set in a post-apocalyptic future. In order to survive in the extreme places of Earth, humans have combined genetic engineering and cybernetics to turn themselves into mythical beings, like mermaids (called Kampii), centaurs, winged people, etc.. Each of these groups have splintered off, but now a mad scientist is threatening the communities. It is up to Aluna--a Kampii who still has legs, since she has not grown her tail yet--and her friends to unite the different peoples to save themselves.
Note that it is the first of a series. The second book, Mirage, is out already; the next one is due out soon.
---
One of my favorite short stories is "To Serve Man" by Damon Knight. It's a classic Golden Age scifi story. Aliens make contact with Earth and SEEM to be completely altruistic--stopping war, feeding the hungry, etc. But one guy is a little suspicious of their generosity, and he suspects the answers lie in a book all the aliens seem to be carrying around. It's got an excellent last line.
---
Ray Bradbury writes a lot of great classic science fiction. You probably know about Fahrenheit 451, which everyone thinks is about censorship but is actually about how books bring people together while technology alienates us from each other. (I could argue with Bradbury about that all day.) I prefer his short stories, which manage to give a really good creepy dread feeling (they rarely turn out well for the characters). One of my favorites of those is "The Veldt," which is a diatribe against TV--a father starts to get a little worried that his kids are spending all their time in the "nursery," a room that will create whatever environment the kids want. The kids, whose every whim is fulfilled instantly, become spoiled and demanding and finally terrifying.
Also there's his Martian Chronicles, which is presented as a novel but was originally a bunch of different short stories. It gives a lot of vignettes about human settlement on Mars.
---
Finally, I think you'd LOVE There and Back Again by Pat Murphy (sometimes it appears under her pseudonym, Max Merriwell, but it's the same book). It's a reimagining of The Hobbit as a crazy space adventure. It is AWESOME. Bailey Beldon, a "norbit" (pretty much a space hobbit) is content to live in his asteroid in Earth's asteroid belt and never have adventures. Then a family of clone women show up on his asteroid along with the strange wanderer Gitana to pick up a message pod of theirs he'd found--and the next thing he knows, he's joined them on an adventure across the galaxy very reminiscent of The Hobbit--there is a Riddles in the Dark scene, except instead of under a mountain full of orcs it's set in the belly of a spaceship filled with evil brain-stealing space marauders. Mirkwood Forest is replaced by a nebula (though it's still full of spiders); the Rivendell analogue is a huge space station; the Ring is a complex little device that allows one to step outside of time; and in the end there's a battle with a huge robot dragon.
Murphy makes a conscious effort to follow the Joseph Campbell path of the hero (she even mentions it in an author's note). It's really nice to have some female characters in the mix, too. Note that there are a few references to drug use (they drink a sort of drugged alcohol to get "buzzed" at one point). Probably not a big deal, but again, I'm not sure what the parents would say.
Unfortunately, it looks like the book is out of print--but it's readily available used, for pretty good prices.
---
My sister adds a few:
Scott Westerfield's Uglies is the first in a series of dystopian YA novels. I haven't read them, but they resonate well with teenagers. It's a society where you have to have a radical physical alteration to become "pretty" before you get accepted into society.
---
James Dashner's Mazerunner is another one I haven't read, but it's popular too. And he's a local author, which is a plus!
---
The Fifth Wave by Rick Yancey - aliens have taken over, and you don't know who to trust!
---
Of course, Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games trilogy is quite popular right now--more dystopian future fiction. Aside from an exciting adventure, it's an interesting commentary on our fascination with media violence and the modern divide between the haves and the have-nots.
So! That's my list! Anyone want to add any?
ETA: Dammit, also forgot Ringworld! I have no idea how 9th graders would react to that one.
