JOURNAL ENTRY #40
May 1, 2009
Maureen and I attended Ravencon last weekend. One panel I particularly enjoyed serving on was Ten Books You’d Save for Your Child. This with the intention of providing an introduction to science fiction. The panel was moderated by Valerie Griswold-Ford, and included Maggie Stiefvater, Amy Sturgis, and Larry Hodges.
SF seems to me to work best at short length. I’m not entirely sure why that is. It may be that the scientific aspect, the discovery that someone has a basketball that gains energy with each bounce instead of losing it, or that there’s a hyperdense moon orbiting Mars six feet off the ground --Look out, Louie, here it comes again-- provides an impact that can’t be stretched across 100,000 words. The SF that stays with me most clearly is inevitably the great short stories. Arthur Clarke’s “The Star.” Heinlein’s “The Green Hills of Earth.” Bradbury’s “Mars Is Heaven” and “Kaleidoscope.” Asimov‘s “Nightfall.” A. J. Deutsch’s “A Subway Named Mobius.” Jerome Bixby’s “It’s a Good Life” and “The Holes Around Mars.” Theodore Sturgeon’s “To Serve Man.” Daniel Keyes’s “Flowers for Algernon.” Murray Leinster’s “First Contact.” Walter Tevis’s “The Big Bounce.”
Those are off the top of my head. There are probably several dozen others before I’d get to the first novel.
Anyhow, my list of ten books for the kids, in no particular order:
Famous Science Fiction Stories edited by Raymond J. Healy & J. Francis McComas
The Science Fiction Hall of Fame edited by Robert Silverberg
The Martian Chronicles Ray Bradbury
The Midwich Cuckoos or Day of the Triffids or The Kraken Wakes John Wyndham
October the First Is Too Late or The Black Cloud Fred Hoyle
The Nine Billion Names of God Arthur Clarke
Alas, Babylon Pat Frank
Future History Robert Heinlein
A Princess of Mars Edgar Rice Burroughs
Rendezvous with Rama Arthur Clarke
A Princess of Mars doesn’t hold up as well for later reading, but it was my first SF novel, and opened the door to everything else. The story collections speak for themselves. Wyndham and Hoyle were pure magic. Pat Frank’s book arrived, of course, when we were ducking and covering, and it scared me. Under-the-bed scared.
I’d be inclined to think that Rama demands more maturity than a young teen can manage. Except that I keep getting surprised by young teens. It’s maybe a lesson for all of us who’ve been in the classroom: Kids can handle pretty advanced stuff, if we can convince them to give it an honest try, rather than forcing it on them. But that‘s another issue.
I should add that my all-time favorite SF TV hour is Harlan Ellison’s “City on the Edge of Forever” for Star Trek.
The difficult thing about this exercise is reaching beyond my own childhood to guess
--and it’s no more than that-- what books would appeal to kids growing up in the Third Millennium.
In the 1970’s, I was teaching an honors English class at Mt. St. Charles Academy in Woonsocket, RI. It was filled with sharp kids. I might mention a comment by Plato during a discussion of, say, the political dimension of fiction, and the following day someone would correct the quote, or point out that it had arisen in a different context.
One day I recommended everyone watch “Casablanca,” which would be on over the weekend. It was almost, but not quite, an assignment. I assumed they’d love it, as I always have. And maybe they did. But they informed me that the film was a bit slow. I was besieged for the next week with guys --the Mount was an all-boys’ school at the time--, besieged by guys walking around saying things like, “Sam, I thought I told you never to play that in here--.”