Good Quality Science Fiction

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moselle

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My (almost) 15yo son is asking for some science fiction to read. Dh read lots of SciFi when he was young and said he couldn't recommend any of it :duh:. I read Dune and Ender's Game a good while ago but I can't remember if they would be appropriate.

Any suggestions for good quaity, young-person appropriate books?
 
Most sci-fi isn't good quality, appropriate or not.

There's the Left Behind series, I suppose... C.S. Lewis had a sci-fi trilogy, but I've never read it.

The Ender's Game series was one of the few I've read that was good quality, but I'm not sure about its appropriateness for a 15-year-old. I personally wouldn't recommend it to my fifteen-year-old (if I had one).
 
MLCOPE2 said:
Can't go wrong with Star Wars.
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Unless you start getting into all the books that people wrote around the Star Wars universe. Then you run the gamut from appropriate to inappropriate, and from poor quality to ridiculously poor quality. Same goes for Star Trek.
 
moselle said:
My (almost) 15yo son is asking for some science fiction to read. Dh read lots of SciFi when he was young and said he couldn't recommend any of it :duh:. I read Dune and Ender's Game a good while ago but I can't remember if they would be appropriate.

Any suggestions for good quaity, young-person appropriate books?
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I honestly can't think of anything I could recommend that doesn't have sexual references or excessive gore in it. I've read a lot of fantasy sci/fi. Maybe you could just have him read The Lord of the Rings series and the Narnia series.
 
Hi:

Most of Robert Heinlein's early works, Space Cadet, Starship Troopers, Citizen of the Galaxy, The Menace From Earth, Have Spacesuit Will Travel, etc. I enjoyed Larry Niven's early work as well, Tales From the Known Universe, Gil the ARM, Ringworld.

Enjoy,

Rob
 
C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy is great. Each one is very different, but they are all good. For beautiful writing I think Perelandra is the best, but for moral criticism That Hideous Strength is hard to beat. But I'd be sorry to have missed Out of the Silent Planet.

What people consider appropriate for a 15-year old can vary widely: I don't remember much science fiction that I would personally recommend: I do remember liking James Blish, both his tellings of actual Star Trek episodes and his own independent fiction, though I probably wouldn't enjoy him now. But it's not uncommon for kids in a certain stage to like things that are rather horrible, but still have pretty good taste when they through that epoch.
 
The first of the Ender series is OK. The last is really poor quality p0rn. Stuff by Raymond Feist is really good, and not anywhere near as bad as most, but there's bad stuff in it. You may want to look at Edgar Rice Burroughs who in addition to Tarzan has a Mars series.
 
1984 is a classic, but could probably use some parental editing (some rather graphic sex scenes in there--sticky notes are a good way to edit without damaging the book). Also, Fahrenheit 451 is considered a classic in the dystopic sci-fi genre.

The Foundation series is also excellent.

And of course there's always classic sci-fi like Around the World in 80 Days, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne or War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man by H. G. Welles.

Lewis's Space Trilogy is also good, if he's on the mature end of the 15-year-old spectrum (That Hideous Strength, though, needs some sort of background knowledge of the Oxbridge university system and 20th century analytic philosophy and scientism in order to have full effect).
 
Isaac Asimov is brilliant and quite humourous. However I would be cautious with some of his later work because it implies some 'scenes' of a sexual nature, though rarely does he ever write about it in detail.

A safe place to start are his short stories: Bicentennial Man, I, Robot etc.
 
I don't think I would recommend Dune - certainly not to a 15-year old. I think the way those books employ certain content is exceptionable. If he could stomach Dune, he'd be better off reading Stephen R. Donaldson's Gap series.
 
I read Asimov when I was 15. I don't remember anything sexual. It's funny though. Any science fiction I read is always compared to Asimov. It's almost like, when my dad gave me his books, he became the plumbline.
 
Asimov had a particularly violent hatred of Christianity, and it came through by pushing evolution and psychology as replacements for religion. But as been said, the sexuality isn't as explicit as it is today, probably due mostly to the time he wrote.

Dune is more spiritual, as are all of Herbert's works. Creating gods is a theme throughout his works, but the sexuality gets really over the top, like in Helstrom's Hive.

The problem with SciFi and Fantasy is that if one restricts oneself to Biblical themes, one can't write in either genre.

Perhaps you could try alternate history for the kid? Eric Flynn has a series about a 20th century Virginia mining town taken back in time to the 100 years war in Germany. Still lots of sex and bad language, though.
 
Sorry folks, I didn't see the reader was 15!

I normally suggest, for a 15 year old, is something from our YP collection or a dystopian work such as The Bar Code Tattoo by Weyn.
 
Thanks Everyone! I think I'll do a quick search at our public library and see what they have - some of those stories that have become films might interest him. Interesting about Asimov's perpective - ds is often better at picking out the anti-Christian aspects of literature than I am. Short stories might be a good place to start. And I'd forgotten about Verne and Wells.
 
I forgot to mention these: Canticle for Leibowitz is good, and so is I Am Legend. The latter contains some reference to sexual temptation, but it isn't prurient.
 
I agree that C S Lewis' Cosmic trilogy is brilliant and nothing in it to object to anywhere that I can think of - but it might still be heavy going for someone that age.
Is John Wyndham known in the US? His are more accessible I would say - vintage, but that means nothing unsuitable, and real page-turners .
Chocky (less well-known) could even be good for someone younger still - The Day of the Triffids is about the best though
 
The problem with SciFi and Fantasy is that if one restricts oneself to Biblical themes, one can't write in either genre.
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Actually, I beg to differ. I suppose this would be a good place to put in a plug for Rich Coffeen's Discipling of Mytra, which is a sci-fi novel about taking the great commission to space. There's a lot of discussion of sex (and homosexuality) in the novel--but from a reformed Christian perspective.
 
Canticle for Leibowitz
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Did you really like that, Ruben? The main idea (it's been 35 years since I read it, so this from memory) was how Scripture was based on badly interpreted, corrupted writings. Wasn't their Bible based on some guys shopping list?
 
Not so much of a science fiction novel as a genuine *thrill-ride* of a fantasy is George MacDonald's "Phantastes." MacDonald was a Christian mythopoetic author who wrote this book in 1857. When I read it a few years ago, I expected it to be tame, prosaic, boring, etc. "Phantastes" is anything but that. The thing stays with you, too, for quite awhile after you finish it...

Margaret
 
JM said:
Star Trek...anyone? :bueller:
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not the books! anything but the books!!
(not any one that I've seen, anyway)

---------- Post added at 07:35 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:33 PM ----------

repeating my previous question, just out of interest -
does anyone know John Wyndham's books in the States?
 
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