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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.
Well, I read Ender's Game as a 10-year old and loved it, but I wouldn't exactly recommend that as an intentional parental choice, lol. I was also a giga-bookworm as a kid though, so it's a bit of an exercise to put myself in opposite shoes.
I'd say Starship Troopers but the dated language might put him off if he doesn't already like reading. That kind of thing can make old books more of a challenge, or chore, for kids then many well-read adults probably realize... lots of words to look up and unfamiliar sentence structure. I-Robot could also be a great choice, but probably the same caveat -- and it sounds like he'd bounce off of something like Foundation. Frankly I think a lot of the suggestions downthread are great for a precocious 10-year-old who likes books, but would not convince one to like books.
The first Hitchhiker's Guide book, maybe? It's very funny and fast moving, although there is some adult humor in there.
If he likes Star Wars there are a number of quite good YA-ish book series from the older Expanded Universe. Obviously more space opera than "real" SF, but that's not necessarily a problem. For a kid I'd probably suggest the X-Wing series. They're very fun and fast-paced mil-SF books, with the focus on soldiers and dogfighting rather than Jedi mysticism. Lots of action but nothing too bloody, a touch of romance but nothing explicit, and the good guys always win in the end -- great for a kid imo. I believe I started reading those around age 10 myself. For something more kid-oriented there's also the Jedi Apprentice books (which are basically short stories/novellas, and so might be more up his alley), I started those a little younger but definitely still liked them at 10 and beyond. They're not high literature or anything but they have good characters and engaging plots with real stakes, iirc, and could be better suited for a kid who doesn't want to sit down with a 200+ page novel.
Animorphs is much-beloved and should be engaging reads, I was never really into them but lots of people have fond memories.
I have a vague half-memory of reading some books in what I believe was the "Young Tom Swift", or something like that, series (a modern reboot of the classic adventure novels) around that age as well... can't properly endorse something I don't really remember, but they were pretty quick reads and very gadget and invention oriented, which could be fun for a kid with more of an engineer-type brain (although maybe not so much if he's really into the hard science side).
I also want to second the post that mentioned Percy Jackson and Harry Potter. They may seem like basic choices, and they are fantasy rather than SF, but they're famous for a good reason. A whole lot of kids seem to get very rapidly hooked by these, and he is just the right age.
Seconded Hitchhiker's. I read the first one when I was about that age and loved it.
Yep, I think I was a year or two older when I first read it but no more than that. Still one of my all-time favorites.
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