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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1522 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 1, 2026

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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.

I, Robot? It's old-school but there's the satisfying 'oh... that's how the laws of robotics go wrong in this scenario' that he might appreciate, and it's short stories.

Yeah, precocious 10-year-old is the perfect age to start Asimov.

Agreed, if you stick to the short stories and if you're careful to pick the best short stories (the I, Robot collection is a good place to start). I tried Asimov novels with each of my kids, and somewhere in between 10 and 13 seems to be where the first Foundation novel went from "too dull" to "fascinating" in general.

Foundation is a collection of longer short stories, anyway. Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation are each two novellas republished in a single bound volume.

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