I got interested in SF because the librarian in my elementary was a SF lover. There were racks of paperbacks that I gobbled up and it’s stuck with me for decades since. It makes me sad to think that kids don’t have the same chance I did to get interested at an early age in the most imaginative genre of fiction. We all need to do our part to pass it on.
What are your suggestions for getting young people interested in science fiction?
A few I remember from that time:
Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom series
Heinlein’s juveniles like Podkayne of Mars and Have Spacesuit, Will Travel
McCaffery’s Dragonriders of Pern
Niven’s Known Space books
One of the first books I can remember reading was a Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle. The concept of tesseracts totally blew my young mind.
For me it was And He Built a Crooked House.
A Wrinkle in Time and The Green Book were my first introduction to Sci-Fi books, but I was well versed in movie sci-fi by then.
Absolutely loved that book as a kid. I think trying to understand tesseracts turned into a love of math, or at least brought it out for me, too. Great book, great example of how SF can spark a child’s interest in science.