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
We read it for English in grade 10. Not sure if that was just because it was an advance placement class where our teacher had more discretion on the materials, or if everyone read it at that grade.