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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1522 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 1, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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YA SF recommendations wanted!

The Mini-STEMlord of this thread is 10 this week and we are still trying to get him to read books. Based on the films and TV he likes, his preferred genre of fiction is SF, with a mild preference for harder SF. He has asked for the books of Dune and The Martian after watching the movies, but found them too difficult.

Apart from going old school and introducing him to the Heinlein juveniles, I have no idea what SF is out there for younger readers. Mini-STEMlord has a reading age of at least 14 and can handle science concepts at an A-level to first year undergraduate level. (In terms of maths, he has mastered algebra but hasn't started trig or calculus. He was able to follow a 1st-year undergraduate biochem course on MIT OpenCourseware when he was healthy and rested but not when he was tired or had a cold). But he has no reading stamina - with one exception the longest thing he has read is a Wikipedia article. I don't know if that means anthologies of short stories would be better than novels.

Any advice appreciated.

If he likes animals, the Willard Price books ("Undersea Adventure" and the like) are also perennial classics.

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