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
Alan Dean Foster’s series Pip and Flinx and his Icerigger and Commonwealth Founding trilogies.
George Martin’s “Tuf Voyaging”.
Harry Harrison’s “Deathworld” and “To the Stars” trilogies.
Frank Herbert’s “Whipping Star” and “The Dosadi Experiment”.