Best Intro to Sci-Fi for Young Readers
Top 10 Best Intro to Sci-Fi for Young Readers
: I, Robot, The Foundation Trilogy, Among the Hidden, Have Space Suit—Will Travel (Heinlein's Juveniles, #12), The Dragonriders of Pern, Lord of the Flies, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dragonsong, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
| Author | Isaac Asimov |
| ISBN | 0553803700 |
The three laws of Robotics:
1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2) A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as...
| Author | Isaac Asimov |
| ISBN | 0380508567 |
A THOUSAND-YEAR EPIC, A GALACTIC STRUGGLE, A MONUMENTAL WORK IN THE ANNALS OF SCIENCE FICTION
FOUNDATION begins a new chapter in the story of man's future. As the Old Empire crumbles into barbarism throughout the million worlds of the galaxy, Hari Seldon and his band of psychologists must...
| Author | Margaret Peterson Haddix |
| ISBN | 1416924981 |
SHADOW CHILDREN Luke has never been to school. He's never had a birthday party, or gone to a friend's house for an overnight. In fact, Luke has never had a friend.
Luke is one of the shadow children, a third child forbidden by the Population Police. He's lived his entire life in hiding, and now,...
| Author | Robert A. Heinlein |
| ISBN | 1416505490 |
My first Robert A. Heinlein work read and still one of my favorites.
Heinlein produced his juvenile books for Charles Scribner's Sons mainly in the 1950s and these were what many consider to be some of his finest work. I’ve always thought that the period between 1957 and 1966 was his zenith,...
| Author | Anne McCaffrey |
| ISBN | 0785729194 |
Alternate cover edition can be found here.
Finally together in one volume, the first three books in the world's most beloved science fiction series, THE DRAGONRIDERS OF PERN, by Anne McCaffrey, one of the great science fiction writers of all time: DRAGONFLIGHT, DRAGONQUEST, THE WHITE DRAGON....
| Author | William Golding |
| ISBN | 0140283331 |
At the dawn of the next world war, a plane crashes on an uncharted island, stranding a group of schoolboys. At first, with no adult supervision, their freedom is something to celebrate; this far from civilization the boys can do anything they want. Anything. They attempt to forge their own society, failing,...
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
| Author | Robert C. O'Brien |
| ISBN | 0689862202 |
Mrs. Frisby, a widowed mouse with four small children, must move her family to their summer quarters immediately, or face almost certain death. But her youngest son, Timothy, lies ill with pneumonia and must not be moved. Fortunately, she encounters the rats of NIMH, an extraordinary breed of highly...
| Author | Arthur C. Clarke |
| ISBN | 0451457994 |
On the Moon, an enigma is uncovered.
So great are the implications of this discovery that for the first time men are sent out deep into our solar system.
But long before their destination is reached, things begin to go horribly, inexplicably wrong...
One of the greatest-selling...
A book doesn't have to be Great Literature or even particularly good to appear on my "formative fiction" shelf, it just has to be a book with a meaning that changed me or helped me to understand myself and the world in a new way. Fortunately, Dragonsong is also a very good book of its type.
The best...
| Author | Robert A. Heinlein |
| ISBN | 0340837942 |
It is a tale of revolution, of the rebellion of a former penal colony on the Moon against its masters on the Earth. It is a tale of a culture whose family structures are based on the presence of two men for every woman, leading to novel forms of marriage and family. It is the story of the disparate people, a computer...
The Overlords appeared suddenly over every city--intellectually, technologically, and militarily superior to humankind. Benevolent, they made few demands: unify earth, eliminate poverty, and end war. With little rebellion, humankind agreed, and a golden age began.
But at what cost?...
I Am Legend and Other Stories
Robert Neville is the last living man on Earth...but he is not alone. Every other man, woman, and child on Earth has become a vampire, and they are all hungry for Neville's blood.
By day, he is the hunter, stalking the sleeping undead through the abandoned ruins of civilization. By night, he barricades...
| Author | John Christopher |
| ISBN | 0689856725 |
Long ago, the Tripods—huge, three-legged machines—descended upon Earth and took control. Now people unquestioningly accept the Tripods' power. They have no control over their thoughts or their lives.
But for a brief time in each person's life—in childhood—he is not a slave. For...
| Author | John Christopher |
| ISBN | 0689857624 |
Long ago, the Tripods--huge, three-legged machines--descended upon Earth and took control. Now people unquestioningly accept the Tripods' power. They have no control over their thoughts or their lives. But for a brief time in each person's life--in childhood--he is not a slave. For Will, his time...
| Author | Anne McCaffrey |
| ISBN | 0345334310 |
It was Thanksgiving, I was out of town, had just gotten ready to head out for dinner when I heard that Anne McCaffrey had passed. It hit me like a punch in the gut. I couldn't quite shake it all evening. What was going on? Sure, I've read her books but she has never been on a list of favorite authors, why was I so...
| Author | H. Beam Piper |
| ISBN | 0843959118 |
The chartered Zarathustra Company had it all their way. Their charter was for a Class III uninhabited planet, which Zarathustra was, and it meant they owned the planet lock stock and barrel. They exploited it, developed it and reaped the huge profits from it without interference from the Colonial Government....
| Author | James Patterson |
| ISBN | 0446617792 |
Now this is a terrible book.
Written with all the wit and grace of a one-legged puppy, Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment reveals its intentions within the first chapter alone. This is not a book of striking prose or even serviceable but entertaining MOR lit. It is merely a cash cow, another mindless...
| Author | Larry Niven |
| ISBN | 0575077026 |
The artefact is a circular ribbon of matter six hundred miles long and ninety million miles in radius. Pierson's puppeteers, the aliens who discovered it, are understandably wary of encountering the builders of such an immense structure and have assembled a team of two humans, a mad puppeteer and a...
| Author | Jules Verne |
| ISBN | 0812972120 |
I can't remember the number of times I have re-read this Verne masterpiece and discovered something new every time I had. In fact, my book has become so frayed around the edges over the years that I fear I won't be able to open it anymore without being afraid of ruining the pages or the cover for good.
Trying...
| Author | Robert A. Heinlein |
| ISBN | 0345493184 |
This was, hands down, my favorite Heinlein book as a teen. I read it at least 4 or 5 times. I really need to read it again as an adult, but Heinlein ... always an iffy proposition. Though this is one of his early juvie novels, so it's safer than, say, Time Enough for Love.
Two teenage boys, sent away...
| Author | Scott Westerfeld |
| ISBN | 0689865406 |
"Special Circumstances": The words have sent chills down Tally's spine since her days as a repellent, rebellious ugly. Back then Specials were a sinister rumor -- frighteningly beautiful, dangerously strong, breathtakingly fast. Ordinary pretties might live their whole lives without meeting...
| Author | Michael Crichton |
| ISBN | 0060541814 |
The United States government is given a warning by the pre-eminent biophysicists in the country: current sterilization procedures applied to returning space probes may be inadequate to guarantee uncontaminated re-entry to the atmosphere. Two years later, seventeen satellites are sent into the...
| Author | Jeanne DuPrau |
| ISBN | 0375822747 |
An alternate cover edition can be found here.
Many hundreds of years ago, the city of Ember was created by the Builders to contain everything needed for human survival. It worked…but now the storerooms are almost out of food, crops are blighted, corruption is spreading through the city and...
| Author | Robert A. Heinlein |
| ISBN | 1416505520 |
In a distant galaxy, the atrocity of slavery was alive and well, and young Thorby was just another orphaned boy sold at auction. But his new owner, Baslim, is not the disabled beggar he appears to be: adopting Thorby as his son, he fights relentlessly as an abolitionist spy. When the authorities close...
| Author | Lois McMaster Bujold |
| ISBN | 0743468406 |
Between the seemingly impossible tasks of living up to his warrior-father's legend and surmounting his own physical limitations, Miles Vorkosigan faces some truly daunting challenges.
Shortly after his arrival on Beta Colony, Miles unexpectedly finds himself the owner of an obsolete...
Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant,...
| Author | John Wyndham |
| ISBN | 0812967127 |
In 1951 John Wyndham published his novel The Day of the Triffids to moderate acclaim. Fifty-two years later, this horrifying story is a science fiction classic, touted by The Times (London) as having “all the reality of a vividly realized nightmare.”
Bill Masen, bandages over his wounded...
| Author | Susan Beth Pfeffer |
| ISBN | 0152061548 |
Miranda’s disbelief turns to fear in a split second when a meteor knocks the moon closer to the earth. How should her family prepare for the future when worldwide tsunamis wipe out the coasts, earthquakes rock the continents, and volcanic ash blocks out the sun? As summer turns to Arctic winter, Miranda,...
| Author | C.S. Lewis |
| ISBN | 0007157150 |
In the first novel of C.S. Lewis's classic science fiction trilogy, Dr Ransom, a Cambridge academic, is abducted and taken on a spaceship to the red planet of Malacandra, which he knows as Mars. His captors are plotting to plunder the planet's treasures and plan to offer Ransom as a sacrifice to the creatures...
| Author | Isaac Asimov |
| ISBN | 0586008357 |
A millennium into the future two advancements have altered the course of human history: the colonization of the galaxy and the creation of the positronic brain. Isaac Asimov's Robot novels chronicle the unlikely partnership between a New York City detective and a humanoid robot who must learn to work...
The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
| Author | Neal Stephenson |
| ISBN | 0553380966 |
The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is a postcyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson. It is to some extent a science fiction coming-of-age story, focused on a young girl named Nell, and set in a future world in which nanotechnology affects all aspects of life. The novel deals with themes...
| Author | Philip José Farmer |
| ISBN | 0345419677 |
To Your Scattered Bodies Go is the Hugo Award-winning beginning to the story of Riverworld, Philip José Farmer's unequaled tale about life after death. When famous adventurer Sir Richard Francis Burton dies, the last thing he expects to do is awaken naked on a foreign planet along the shores of a seemingly...
| Author | Piers Anthony |
| ISBN | 0345338588 |
4.0 stars. Piers Anthony is a MIND-NUMBING ENIGMA to me. He is capable of writing extremely thought-provoking, imaginative stories that are both original and speak to fundamental aspects of the human condition. The mystery is that he does so infrequently, despite being one of the most...
| Author | Eleanor Cameron |
| ISBN | 0316125407 |
David and Chuck, two young boys living in California, build a backyard spaceship and jet off to the Mushroom Planet to help save that world, with the help of a rather strange but engagingly enthusiastic scientist in their town. Basidium, the so-called Mushroom Planet (because of, yes, all the giant...
| Author | Robert A. Heinlein |
| ISBN | 0345413997 |
It is 1970, and electronics engineer Dan Davis has finally made the invention of a lifetime: a household robot with extraordinary abilities, destined to dramatically change the landscape of everyday routine. Then, with wild success just within reach, Dan's greedy partner and even greedier fiancée...
| Author | Robert A. Heinlein |
| ISBN | 0345324382 |
The Earth of the future does not look nice. It is overcrowded with severe food shortages. By the way we might still have this problem, 67 years after the book was published but it is amusing that Heinlein was so wrong about the reason for this...
Anyway a father and his son, George and Bill Lermer...
| Author | Anne McCaffrey |
| ISBN | 0345327861 |
I read this book as a youth and loved it, but reading it now at age 45 it does not quite hold the same appeal. I see a woman that is hell-bent on remaining without attachments. She is very bright and talented, but remains aloof emotionally (the come-and-go sexual relationships), socially, psychologically...
| Author | John Christopher |
| ISBN | 0689856695 |
The Pool of Fire (The Tripods #3), John Christopher
The Tripods is a series of young adult novels written by John Christopher, beginning in 1967. The first two were the basis of a science fiction TV series, produced in the United Kingdom in the 1980s.
Series: The White Mountains (1967); The City...
