Sandra Tayler–The Non-Fictional Sense of Wonder

Sandra Tayler is an author of short fiction, mother of four, blogger, and co-manager of the business that puts out the Hugo-nominated web comic Schlock Mercenary.

The book was red and yellow, not just on the cover, but the pages were yellow too. It was not a typical reading choice for me. At 10 years old, I liked books about magic and this one had a pair of kids in space suits on the cover. Lost Race of Mars, proclaimed the title. I was at my grandma’s house, it was too hot to play outside, and there wasn’t much else to read except antique magazines about antiques. Perhaps this book would be okay. I liked watching Star Trek, it had space ships and aliens too. So I cracked open the pages and joined Jim and Sally Chambers in their move to live on a Mars colony. Robert Silverberg wrote Lost Race of Mars in the years leading up to the first moon launches. He imagined a future with space colonies and described it to kids in a way that focused on those matters which are most important to kids, like having to leave your friends and pets behind, but then finding new alien friends and pets on Mars. I first read the book only a few years after the space shuttle Columbia blasted out into orbit. I too lived in an era where Mars colonies seemed an obvious part of the future.

Decades later I sat with my six year old son watching Firefly. The show was a little scarier than what I’d shown him before, but I wanted to share my love of science fiction with him. I wanted him to feel the same wonder and joy I felt when reading books which attempted to answer the question “what if.” There were few science fiction books aimed at his age group. I was left with movies and video games. My little boy was tense, completely involved in the drama of the show, so I paused the show to explain how it was all pretend.

He turned wide eyes to me in disbelief and said “You mean space ships aren’t real?” It was like I had stolen Christmas. I explained to him that yes we did have space ships, but that they didn’t look like the ones in the movies. So we googled space shuttles, the International Space Station, and the Russian space program. A few days later we gathered all four of my kids and took a trip to an air and space museum where my children stared with wide-mouthed wonder at WWII bomber planes and exhibits explaining aerodynamics. I realized then a possible reason for the dearth of science fiction books for kids younger than teens. They don’t need science fiction to take them to fantastic futures when the world of non-fiction is so filled with wonder. We swung by the library on the way home and grabbed a pile of books from the kids non-fiction section.

Among that pile were some Magic School Bus books. These books were based on the television show in which a crazy teacher loads her classroom full of kids into her magic school bus to go on a field trip to learn about science. Sometimes they traveled in time, others they shrunk to microscopic proportions, still others they learned the physics of magnets. The series wrapped fiction around the science in a way to make clear which was which. It was perfect. The kids read every page and asked for more. We expanded to reading and watching other things with hidden, or not so hidden, science content. Shows like How It’s Made and Mythbusters were frequently re-watched favorites, as were a variety of nature programs. Through these mediums my children learned science concepts and loved
them.

Yet two years after that day with my son, I find that I still lament the fact that my kids do not have literature which teaches them to dream of space exploration in the way that I did. There is a dearth of moon colonies and friendly robots in books for younger readers. I am forced to delve into the collection from my childhood and share with my children. That copy of Lost Race of Mars came home with me from my grandma’s house. It is time for me to dust it off and read it with my kids. After that we’ll dive into The Norby Chronicles by Janet and Isaac Asimov. The retirement of the space shuttle program means that my children will not get to wake early and watch rockets fly on live television, as I did. But perhaps they can be part of a generation that dreams about space and launches us all into a grand new venture. So I will feed mixed-up robots and Mars cats into my children’s imaginations, then see how far we fly.

42 thoughts on “Sandra Tayler–The Non-Fictional Sense of Wonder

  • October 6, 2011 at 6:27 am
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    Two things:

    1) I still tear up a little when Sandra recounts this story about my youngest. “You mean spaceships aren’t REAL?”

    2) That old Lost Race of Mars book was priceless on a lot of levels. I’m going to have to get Bob Silverberg to sign it.

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  • October 6, 2011 at 8:07 am
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    This was excellently written. Bravo.

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  • October 6, 2011 at 8:19 am
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    Actually, the Magic Schoolbus books came first. The cartoon came later.

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  • October 6, 2011 at 8:26 am
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    Robert heinlien was my source of Sci Fi, but Asimov wrote some really fun “Space opera” stuff under a pen name, and I think your kids would enjoy them, Who doesn’t love a sentient beaver as a side kick?
    P.S. yes I too am disappointed in our lack of progress, but you’re right, our kids are the hope for the future

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  • October 6, 2011 at 8:35 am
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    No worries, there’s still launches to watch even if the US doesn’t want to play. There’s other powerful nations that does this, among them China, and Russia, and.. Denmark.

    I think that you’d like to look up http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com. It’s a launch program project set in motion by hobbyists. Which means that it’ll be possible to explain all the science stuff behind it, and that there’s a good story in it, too, because of the simple goal: We want to launch a human being into space.
    And that story is then backed with the notion that everybody can do this, your kids too (when grown a little, that is).
    Copenhagen Suborbitals have had two launches so far. The first didn’t take off due to a defect hair-dryer. The second one launched just fine.

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  • October 6, 2011 at 8:43 am
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    Wonderful read Mrs. Taylor.
    I got into sci-fi by watching Star Trek with my dad as a kid..
    Read every science and sci-fi book I could get my hands on.
    Yes, our children are our hope for the future, but most people seem to forget that we are the hope for the present.

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  • October 6, 2011 at 10:35 am
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    Well done Sandra. Mythbusters and How It’s Made are two of our family favorites as well. That and Dirty Jobs. I wish Mr. Wizard or Bill Nye The Science Guy were still on the air. We need more shows about making science fun.
    I think tonight’s bedtime story will be “Puffle Goes To Mars.” I had better get writing it. Then the kids can spend a few days drawing pictures for it, and then we will read it all over again.
    Sigh, I just gave myself homework. Being a grown up SUCKS.

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  • October 6, 2011 at 12:10 pm
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    Very well written, Mrs. Tayler. I’m a bit older than you, I remember Sputnik and my dad mumbling about the Russians as he read about it in The Washington Post and The Evening Star.

    Tom Corbett Jr. and Robert Heinlein; my favourite uncle teaching me navigation with a middy’s sextant, asking him about navigation in space and sitting next to him at his desk whilst he explained it with diagrammes and math.

    Thank you, ma’am.

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  • October 6, 2011 at 2:08 pm
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    You know, I think Lost Race of Mars might have been my first science fiction, too. It was on the shelf in the sixth-grade classroom, that much I know, and what you’re describing sure fits the bill. After I read that, I went to the public library and it turned out they had a lot more like it. I read all of them. (It was a small library.) Then I went to the library at the county seat and read all of those.

    Now I sit in my home at my information terminal and sell my services to people everywhere on the planet at the speed of light (and my daughter wants to be an astronaut).

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  • October 6, 2011 at 2:14 pm
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    I invite anyone that shares a frustration on our rate of progress in exploring and settling space to check out the Space Frontier Foundation. We’re a non-profit looking to help promote space settlement in as near a future as possible.

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  • October 6, 2011 at 3:21 pm
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    What a wonderful piece. I was directed here from the Schlock Mercenary website, and I have to say I’m glad I came. As I find myself further engrossed in the speculative fiction genres, it’s easy for me to forget that my own world has wonders of its own. Thank you for the reminder.

    I hope to see more work form you in the future.

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  • October 6, 2011 at 3:44 pm
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    My first scifi book was the run away robot. I loved it. It showed pails devotion to his robot rex I think. And his robots returned love. I read it to my kids too. Someday soon I will hopefully get to read it to the grand children

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  • October 6, 2011 at 4:51 pm
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    I went to a rather old-fashioned grade school from K-3

    The library there literally sorted books into shelves by grade – IE, the books we were “Supposed” to read. It was a real fight to check out something “inappropriate.” At an early age, i was reading WAY beyond my grade level and was highly frustrated. After a lot of persistence, i was able to get the shelf of fairytale collections opened to me (i don’t think the person assigned as librarian – i can’t believe she actually was a proper one – read much and didn’t realize how horrific some of original versions of the fairy tales were, but it didn’t bother me. I shortly made my way through the entire shelf of the color-names Fairy Tale collections. Blue book of Fairy Tales, Green Book, Red Book, etc etc. Many of them were regional collections. Some were thematic. It gave me a real sense of how stories were put together for one thing ,and introduced me to a lot of the most basic story structures.

    But once i exhausted that, I gave up on my school library and begged my parents to take me across town to the City Library. The Children’s Library section in the Topeka Public library was great, and as I explained my interests to the Librarian there – a lovely woman well worthy of the name – she got me started on various young adult SF including, the Tom Swift books, and my favorite “first real SF” for young adults – the “Mr Bass” or “Mushroom Planet” books by Eleanor Cameron. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wonderful_Flight_to_the_Mushroom_Planet

    Check them out – they are not kiddy books, but well paced and a good length for a good reader of about 3rd to 5th grade to get introduced to SF.

    This period lasted me about 6 months, and before long I had finagled myself a provisionary “adult” card with the Librarian’s support so that i could start reading my way through the Heinlein juveniles… by the time they stopped checking up on me, i was reading everything else by Heinlein, and Asimov, and Silverberg, etc etc…

    But anyway… i HIGHLY recommend the Mr. Bass books as a good transition from Kiddie SF books (which i still consider the Zot books to be in that category) to the beginnings of real novels. I also recommend Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars by Daniel Pinkwater (The author even has a certain resemblance to the Tayler Pater).

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  • October 6, 2011 at 5:54 pm
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    I still tear up when I think about the dearth of real spaceships. I’m still mourning what the Year 2000 was supposed to bring us… and celebrating all the unexpected greatness that we’ve gotten instead. As a kid, I would’ve killed to have the LEGO Mindstorms that my kids take for granted.

    The kinds of software that I write for a living hadn’t even been invented when I graduated from high school; the biggest gift we can give our kids is the earnest desire to learn. It’s likely that what they will do for a living in the future hasn’t been invented yet!

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  • October 6, 2011 at 6:20 pm
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    I too got started in Sci-Fi with Heinlein. It took me until the fourth grade to understand what reading was about, then you couldn’t stop me. I became a library assistant and read out my elementary schools library.
    For TV shows, I highly recommend PBS’s “Connections” which leaves you looking at the world in a whole new way.

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  • October 7, 2011 at 3:57 am
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    Nice story. I work at the Kennedy Space Center and was here in the Launch Control Center working the countdowns of the the last launches. We are just starting to gear up to begin launching a heavy lift rocket even bigger than the old Saturn V that launched our Astronauts to the Moon. If you like, send me an address via email, and I will send some shuttle pins and other stuff for you and Howard and the children. .
    Big Fan
    Ken

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  • October 7, 2011 at 4:16 am
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    And about age when reading SF, I was reading Edgar Rice Burroughs about Tarzan, Mars, Venus and Pellucidar when I was in 5th grade. I was reading Asimaov and Harlen Ellison and others in 7th grade. My favorite book was a Hugo Winners my mom got for my 12th birthday. Looong long ago.

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  • October 7, 2011 at 4:17 am
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    Funny you should mention Silverberg’s kid sf. I just rediscovered my copy of Silverberg’s Revolt on Alpha C.

    There’s a good bit of juvenile sf over at Project Gutenberg, some of it pretty good.

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  • October 7, 2011 at 5:07 am
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    Anyone else remember John Christopher’s Tripods trilogy? The White Mountains is the first book. The protagonist is fourteen, if I remember correctly, and the writing is appropriate for younger readers. And the YA Heinlein books, as always.

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  • October 7, 2011 at 5:38 am
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    Two sci fi books I loved when I was a child are The Runaway Robot by Lester Del Rey and The Forgotten Door by Alexander Key.

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  • October 7, 2011 at 6:06 am
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    My first science fiction book in 1958 (at age 7) was “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea” by Jules Verne. I was living on the island of Guam, and I loved the sea. Plus, the hardcover edition had these incredible color lithographs that just reached out and grabbed me by the eyeballs. The librarian would not let me check it out to read it because it was for adults, and I came home in tears.
    My father (a U.S. Navy pilot), took me back to the library and told them to check out to me any book I wanted to read, and that he would be the judge of what was and was not appropriate for me to read, not them. Dad told me about 20 years later that it took me about 7 weeks to get through it, lying on the floor and looking up all the words I did not understand in a dictionary. It was a very tough read, but well worth the pain.

    I discovered Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein at age 9, and by the time I was ready to enter high school in 1965, I was determined to become a U.S. Navy pilot and then an astronaut. I used to say:

    My name is Rodger Morris,
    The USA’s my nation,
    Naval Air my training place,
    The stars my destination.

    Yeah, I paraphrased Gully Foyle, protagonist of Alfred Bester’s, “The Stars My Destination”, if I recall correctly. And, I meant every word of it. Ultimately, I did become a Naval Flight Officer, but did not qualify for astronaut training.

    Where is the wonder I felt then? Do kids still feel it now?

    In a way, I have come full circle to my love of the sea. I now crew as a volunteer on a tall ship, Schooner Bill of Rights, and I work as the liaison with youth groups (Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Naval Sea Cadet Corps, and the like).

    We were in the midst of a cannon battle at sea against 7 other tall ships last month, and I saw a kid playing a game on his cell phone. I asked him about it, and he said, “I’m bored.” My reply was, “Dude! Let me see if I understand this. You are in the middle of a REAL first person shooter game, and you are bored??”

    Then I got him throwing pancakes at the other tall ships. End of boredom…

    Best,

    Rodger Morris
    rodger.l.morris@gmail.com

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  • October 7, 2011 at 8:06 am
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    The early sci fi I recall was Star Trek on TV and in comics or novels, James Blish, R.A. Heinlein, and fairly shortly thereafter L. Neil Smith. In there were Asimov and Norton and Clarke.

    I do recall enjoying the Heinlein Juveniles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinlein_juveniles). Particularly Starman Jones, Have Spacesuit – Will Travel, and Farmer in the Sky. Tunnel in the Sky was one of my favourite books as well. Citizen of the Galaxy had a bit of darkness about it, so I suspect one might want to be a little older to appreciate it.

    Now I have so much scifi that moving gets more and more onerous. Wouldn’t part with those books though unless I had no other option.

    And all of that interest in science and technology has led to a reasonable career in computer programming building complex systems for various domains.

    Our world is so technology driven and the thirst for the new and the improved is great enough that teaching our kids to retain a sense of wonder is one of the greatest favours we can do them I suspect.

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  • October 7, 2011 at 8:19 am
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    I like this piece too, but I can’t help feeling that Firefly cannot possibly be suitable six-year-old fare.

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  • October 7, 2011 at 9:24 am
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    Two of my favorite books as a child were “You Will Go to the Moon,” published in 1959, and Heinlein’s “Have Space Suit, Will Travel.” Nine years later, “2001” cemented the idea that space travel should be not only feasible but damned luxurious. These things continue to fuel my lasting indignation 50 years later that I don’t even have a flying car yet. Nothing available to-day fills my young granddaughters with that sense of awe or a feeling that it might just be possible for them to become spacers someday, and this is a tragedy. Delightful piece of writing.

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  • October 7, 2011 at 2:08 pm
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    As many others have mentions the Heinlein and Asimov juveniles are a great place to start, as is the little known ‘Dig Allen Space Explorer’ series by Joseph Greene. I spent many an hour immersed in those stories.

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  • October 7, 2011 at 9:58 pm
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    I would suggest Nova Science Now (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/) as a great science program for kids. My future astronaut (he turns 5 this month) can’t get enough of them. It is quite cute to hear him spout off some science fact and then attribute it to “Dr. Neil”.

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  • October 8, 2011 at 5:43 am
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    Good piece. I’m glad Howard linked this from Schlock 😉

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  • October 8, 2011 at 7:16 am
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    @Elizabeth: The six-year-old in question is our youngest (now eight,) and is continually being exposed to entertainment we’d never have allowed our 14-year-old (now 16) to view when SHE was his age.

    We do what we can to keep content age-appropriate, but there’s no escaping the fact that the youngest ones are going to grow up faster than the older ones.

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  • October 8, 2011 at 9:52 am
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    Excellent piece, Ma’am. I loved going to museums too, and still do when time permits.

    I can’t recall what my first Sci-Fi book was, but I definitely remember Starship Troopers. I think I read it when I was 10. I had to read it again a year later to really pick up on the commentary, but the wonder of the trooper’s suits and the adventure of intergalactic war and conquest captured my imagination. My father, who has a collection which sprawls our entire house, gave me a full reading list and my own shelf for completed books. The Rolling Stones, Citizen of the Galaxy, I Robot, War of the Worlds, and more that I escape my memory filled that shelf in a matter of a few months. As I read, each new technology, every new principle or invention that allowed a SF story to exist intrigued me. I began to study the technology and physics on me own, to find out why we didn’t already have what I was reading about. Now, I’m a Sophomore at UW set to major in Physics. My point in this miniature autobiography is to present an example of what happens when that wonder and curiosity in childhood is allowed and encouraged to grow.

    Who knows? Mayhaps I will invent or discover a way to manipulate or negate the effects of gravity using quantum fluctuations of neutrinos, or a more efficient Retro Encabulator. (Look it up!) Nevertheless, just going into space would scratch an itch I got from Heinlein, Asimov and Mrs. Frizzle.

    In the words of Jack Horkheimer, “Keep looking up!”

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  • October 8, 2011 at 10:40 am
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    Hopefully the kids will be able to watch Richard Branson’s space ships fly (http://www.virgingalactic.com/) I got the same sort of sense of wonderment seeing those test flights as I did seeing the shuttles blast off, or going to the giant telescope with school as a child.

    physorg.com is a great site to find out lots of cool science stuff from nanotech to space to physics too – I read it every lunch time.

    I also enjoy going to the weekly NASA co-lab meetings in second life – they have some great discussions such as the work on rocket rovers to explore martian tunnels

    Space ‘faction’ isn’t dead, you just have to know where to find it 🙂

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  • October 8, 2011 at 2:09 pm
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    is there a way to “share” this on FaceBook?

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  • October 8, 2011 at 2:52 pm
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    For even more titles in scifi – and scifi for the youngest – visit http://www.worldcat.org to find titles and authors being held in public libraries in locally, across the country, and even around the world. Here are a few titles to get you started: Moo Cow Kaboom (Hurd), Hush, Little Alien (Kirk), Skippyjon Jones Lost In Spice ( Schachner).

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  • October 8, 2011 at 9:03 pm
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    Excellent writing as usual Sandra – as a lifelong SF fan (I suspect I’m slightly older than you) I read loads of Heinlein, Asimoc, Clarke and others. Heinlein is a fertile source of books aimed at younger readers, as I daresay you know – many of his such as “Have Spacesuit, Will Travel”, “Podkayne of Mars”, “Tunnel in the Sky” feature youngsters in lead roles. It’d depend on your 6-y-o how suited they are to that age.

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  • October 8, 2011 at 9:04 pm
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    Asmiov, of course. Damn my typing skills.

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  • October 9, 2011 at 6:35 pm
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    For everyone who feels like the current world is slow, stagnant or not advancing. I have a gift of wonder for you as well.

    http://eurekalert.com/ I try to check in here everyday because there are so many new scientific papers on incredible things coming out that they get lost in the churn if you look away too long.

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  • October 11, 2011 at 6:43 pm
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    I also remember back when we were able to cancel our classes and watch the moon landings (and watching them in the summer). I was in grade school then. From then on I was reading sci-fi books. To my father, those stories were non-sense. He prefered westerns, prbably because of it being “frontier” type stories (even though the sci-fi stories were “the final frontier”). Even the stories that were geared toward adults (Star Trek) were enjoyable before I was 10. But, if you’re looking for something more for the kids, early sci-fi TV shows were made for younger audiances. I’m glad that what we thought of as science “fiction” is coming true for the next generation. Imagine what they’ll have for their kids.

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  • October 13, 2011 at 11:34 pm
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    The reason that there is no new science fiction for kids about exploration of the solar system is that the adults no longer think that we are going to get there.

    If you have a time line detailing the projected future you would find it as follows

    60’s and 70’s —- Man’s era of exploration of the universe
    80’s — World to end in nuclear holocaust
    90’s — World to end in world poverty
    00’s — Global warming and heavy weather to cause world destruction

    There is no longer a sense of optimism about the future. Instead we have the idea that the future is a limited pool of resources for which we will have to fight for our share, rather than that the future is a pool to which we contribute.

    We can do nothing because our colective imagination can not conceive of another future.

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  • October 14, 2011 at 7:49 am
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    My wife and I were discussing with our daughters teachers (K and First grade) exactly why we think our children have an advantage. Back in the dinosaur days when I was growing up there was exactly one educational channel, PBS (where I grew up WTTW, channel 11 chicago) Now through the advent of digital cable, they have ten or twenty educational children’s channels.

    I also grew up reading Messers. Heinlein and Asimov, they wrote juvenile science fiction though because it PAID to write it. Anyone familiar with Robert’s life, should also be familiar with the struggles he went through with his editor’s and school librarians about the content of his books. Today? In a litigious society, desperate to “protect the children” at any cost, where radical thought(not politically radical, but imaginatively radical) is discouraged? I fear we may be heading to the dark future predicted by another writer I was exposed to as a juvenile, Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451.

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  • October 14, 2011 at 11:13 pm
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    You go, girl! I remember first encountering SF at the age of 11 or so. One of my older brothers had left a copy of some Hugo award collection lying around and I got a hold of it. Having been exposed to the best in the business I was instantly hooked.

    So, forty-something years later I am still seeking stories that tell of far-off wonder and how mankind will deal with the issues that arise. Maybe some of Howard and Sandra’s kids will take up the slack, eh?

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  • October 15, 2011 at 4:57 am
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    Darn it, that’s _another_ Silverberg title* off of which I wore the ink, having checked it repeatedly in my youth. I _owe_ that gentleman, big time.

    Thank you for the excellent post, Sandra!
    – Chris

    ________
    * “Revolt on Alpha-C” was the other. I began paying attention to authors a few years later…

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  • October 26, 2011 at 6:20 pm
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    Excellent piece. I felt an ache when reading your son’s question, because I am certainly in the same place a lot of you were when I was a child, assuming with no doubt at all that we would be in space by the time I reached…well, I’m 42 now, so by the time we reached today for sure! There is a great degree of sadness coupled with the fact that we are not.

    I recently listened to the excellent Full Cast Audio presentation of The Rolling Stones by Robert Heinlein. Despite some of the dated elements, it was performed so well and was the kind of rip-roaring adventure in space that I think would still appeal to younger children, especially in this audio version. I got the same feeling of sadness listening to it because Heinlein doesn’t shy away from putting some plausible sounding science in his books. It sounds so plausible that it makes you wish all over again that we were shuttling back and forth between here and Mars right now.

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