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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1225 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.

Ender's Game has a child protagonist, but the violence might be a bit excessive for a ten-year-old.

When I was that age I read this collection of Philip K. Dick stories and don't remember any of them containing anything too objectionable.

Mini-STEMLord loved the Ender's Game film - I refused to buy him the book on the grounds that it encouraged megalomania in gifted children. I do not want my son to see himself as the next Peter Wiggin. But I might be able to relent on that. Rather scarier was that his 6-year-old younger brother also understood and enjoyed the film.

The Shadow series might be better for him- Bean is too alien, Peter isn't a child anymore, and it's pretty consistent near-future science fiction with military plots unlike the mainline Ender's game series, which has thematicism that might be a bit much for a ten year old to really get.

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