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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.
"Apart from using a jack, I have no idea how to hold my car up while I change the tire."
But I guess if the correct fix is one-time-use then it does make sense to ask what to move to afterward.
My kids all loved Heinlein, to the point that the little ones have demanded weaker (in my opinion) Heinlein like Orphans of the Sky first over better novels by other authors, and got more variety mostly via a mix of "my insistence" and "running out of Heinlein". I haven't let the little ones touch his adult-adult novels yet, but he's got one aimed at adults that was totally appropriate for kids: Double Star is a major favorite of theirs.
There are also some adult SF novels that are appropriate enough for kids with a little Parental Guidance (and/or outright censorship; there were a few books that I'd insist on reading out loud with the 10yo so I could do that, despite letting a 13yo read them himself). I'd have put The Martian in this category, though, and it's possible that some of my other suggestions are also too hard for a 10yo? From Heinlein, aside from Orphans, I'd say Starship Troopers, The Puppet Masters, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress really deserve context+discussion. From Weir there's also Hail Mary. (Artemis was so disappointing - a young-adult sort of story with inappropriate-for-kids text was exactly the opposite of what I wanted...)
The "Crosstime Traffic" by Harry Turtledove has a half dozen (self-contained; it's a series because it shares the same worldbuilding but there's different characters each time and no reading order is assumed) young adult novels that range from good to great. They're more educational than the Heinlein juveniles, too: hard SF of the "One Big Lie" variety, where aside from the sideways-in-time-travel all the worldbuilding is either real history or plausible-alternate-history from a PhD historian whose fiction specialized in that. With Heinlein there's always a mix of stuff like orbital dynamics working out on the dot versus "Total Conversion" (without antimatter) and "Martian canals" where we really knew better by the time he was writing and the last nails went into the coffin a decade or two later.
Someone's already brought up Asimov's short stories, which (if you pick the right anthologies; his later short stories were weaker) I agree with. Niven and Heinlein also had a few great short stories, and Niven's got a few shorter adult novels (World of Ptaavs, Protector in particular) that one of my kids enjoyed. Asimov's Foundation may be too dull for a 10 year old, but The Caves of Steel might not be. The sequels to that one get less age-appropriate fast, though, and even in the first book my daughter disliked the main protagonist.
If fantasy is an option too:
I loved Pratchett's The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents ... though none of my kids did. De gustibus non est disputandum, I guess. They did like Mort, though, and haven't tried other Discworld novels yet.
I'd say that Mother of Learning would be the ideal way to build up reading stamina ... except that it has a slow start; my kids might have given up on it if I hadn't insisted they make it past chapter 4 first.
Oh, I almost forgot to bring up Percy Jackson and Harry Potter. Those answers seem "too obvious", I guess, but the former is probably what got my kids doing the most reading in total, and the latter took more than one of my kids from "reluctantly willing to let mommy or daddy read a chapter of something to them before bed" to "finishing hundreds of pages on their own because daddy doesn't read out loud fast enough" in no time flat.
I bounced off Discworld at 10, and came back to it slightly older and fell in love, as all true geeks do.
Hah, I did type "Ringworld", huh? I'll edit that. My oldest daughter liked the first two Ringworld books but I warned her that they go downhill fast from there.
I'm ashamed to admit that, when I heard of the "Discworld" books after having already heard of Alderson disk worlds (probably from Niven, the author of Ringworld, partially explaining my mental short-circuit above), I thought the whole "you know, like flat Earth, but for comedy" thing sounded like enormously disappointing worldbuilding by comparison. It was probably 15 years later before I realized how wrong I was.
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