Scientifically Accurate Sci-Fi for High-Schoolers?

Raul654 asks: "A member of my immediate family is a biology teacher at an all-girls high school. For some years, she's been giving her students the option to earn extra credit by reading a science-related book. What scientifically accurate science fiction books would you recommend for high school readers?"

Science.... fiction

[IceCreamGuy]

Doesn't the fact that it's science fiction mean that it's not going to be scientifically accurate? Maybe you should look in another category like biological thriller; The Hot Zone is widely regarded to be very accurate.

Red Mars

[Logic and Reason]

Red Mars is the first book of a trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson about the settlement and terraforming of Mars. There's some biology there, though I can't vouch for it (not having studied any biology beyond high school); but overall it's just gripping and completely plausible hard sci-fi. There's some stuff in the other two books that might not be appropriate for high-schoolers, depending on your attitude, but I don't recall anything too objectionable in the first one at least.

Check it out. Even if the class doesn't end up using it, if you're a sci-fi fan then it will be time well spent.

For an all girls school...

[simm1701]

I would certainly recommend Heinlein, especially some of his later work.

I will fear no evil and stranger in a strange land are definitely worth a read

But thats more about adjusting the moral compass of todays youth to a more enlightened philosophy than it is about the science.

Most science fiction tends to ignore science - insofar as changing it goes - they may extrapolate something into the future, or even define their own entire universe - but once thats done they tend to ignore it and concentrate on the people. If you took out the futuristic settings most sci fi would simply be classed as drama, occssionally romance, or for the likes of Heinlein, porn.

Funny, I liked Heinlein's earlier works better...

[Lonewolf666]

That means, everything up to and including "Stranger In A Strange Land". The few later Heinlein books I tried to read invariable bored me, because the suspense was gone. Somehow things were too easy for the heroes...

Re:For an all girls school...

[alphamugwump]

As I recall, stranger in a strange land had absolutely nothing to do with science. Actually, most of the science fiction I've read has had nothing to science, and more to do with humanist philosophy, and the singularity, and all that crap. I think you'd have to read a hell of a lot of science fiction before you learned anything at all about biology, and so it would be a lot easier just to read a biology text. Of course, maybe I've been reading all the wrong stuff...

While you're at it, though, you might as well give them credit for watching science fiction too. You know, stuff like: "watch all of star trek for an extra letter grade" or "watch all of Gundam for an extra letter grade". But it shouldn't count if it takes longer than a month. Make 'em WORK for that A.

Re:Red Mars

[cornjones]

This is exactly the set of books I was going to suggest. It is a 3 part series about terraforming mars. The first book is gaining a foot hold, second is large scale terraforming and the third is setting up a political system. These are some of the best 'hard sci fi' i have read. I was very impressed in his grasp of so many varying scientific areas of study that allowed him to 'logically' extend the field.

The parent makes some allusion to one of the groups in (i think) the third book that have a commune/free love kind of thing going on but that is by no means teh point of the book. Nor do I remember it being particularly graphic but I am not as easily offended as parents so I would recommend you read ahead. The first book is all sci fi and the best of the series.

Re:Science.... fiction

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't the fact that it's science fiction mean that it's not going to be scientifically accurate?

No. Is historical fiction historically inaccurate?

Re:Biology relevant Hard-SF...

[AKAImBatman]

"Andromeda Strain". Classic.

Worst. Book. Ever.

It wouldn't have been so bad if Crichton hadn't managed to (single handedly, I might add) take Deus ex machina to a whole new level. It's so bad that if you look up Deus ex machina in the dictionary, it says "See: Andromeda Strain". (I'm only half joking. Look it up on Wikipedia.)

Crichton has written many other books that are of far more interest. Don't waste your time on AS.

Re:For an all girls school...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the morals I was advocating was the anarchisticand self responsibility view of politics and the rather open and polygamous view of sexuality

As I said good reading for a girls school, given them a sound basis for when they hit their 20's

Yeah, whatever. Why don't you start them on the Chronicles of Gor [wikipedia.org] while you're at it?

Strong female characters - mod parent up

[Peter Trepan]

Since this is going to a girls school, Red Mars should get extra points for having so many female characters in the forefront - though I think Red Mars may be a tad long-winded for high school students. (Use this as a yardstick: Have they read Atlas Shrugged? If so, Red Mars is terse by comparison.)

Also, another poster mentioned Cosmos by Carl Sagan. This is an excellent suggestion. Not only is the main character female, but the story is captivating, and the science is impeccable.

Re:Science.... fiction

[smellsofbikes]

The science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem said (throughout his life) that if humans suddenly woke up with no literature or memory of what had passed before, the first thing we would start writing would be speculations on what the future holds, which is, in essence, science fiction. Good science fiction should be about what tomorrow will be like, if what's going on today keeps going on in some direction. Some of the most interesting feminist fiction -- Margaret Atwood's "Handmaid's Tale" or Marge Piercy's "He, She, It" or Sheri Tepper's "Grass" -- is science fiction. They call it 'speculative fiction' to avoid being accused of genre writing.

What the article is requesting is a different type of science fiction, in my opinion: fiction that is about science itself. I loved reading George Smith's "Venus Equilateral" (as an example) because it was a technical exploration of a future in which we were living the same way humans currently live: competing, cooperating or fighting, inventing, only in space stations, using an entirely tube-based technology. It was a vision of the future that would make an engineer smile, as people put together increasingly technical workarounds to fix problems they needed to overcome (which always produced new and unforseen problems, that the next set of stories would deal with) all based on vacuum-tube technology. To Smith, and to other writers at the time, particularly Heinlein and Asimov, the future looked like it was all based on increasingly sophisticated vacuum tubes. (Tube-based learning systems show up in Heinlein's "The Door Into Summer", as I recall.)

Actually, while I'm on about it: Asimov cheated, as regards hard science, by waving his hands and making up 'positronics' that drove his robots' brains, but his work wasn't essentially about robotics, it was about how humans dealt with what they had created. Smith and early Heinlein was very much about the extension of then-cutting-edge technology far into the future, and how that affected people.

Anyway. Good fiction should be about what could happen and how that would change people, whether focusing on individuals or the whole race. Science fiction fits into that.

Politics and character in Niven, Pournelle, et al

[perfessor multigeek]

That is one of the best posts I've ever seen on Slashdot. detailed, useful, well-written.

But...

Much though I respect Niven and his crowd for their engineering, as pedagogical tools, they are crippled by their handling of human beings. Like Heinlein, but to an even greater degree, that whole cluster of writers is reliably anti-democracy, vastly sexist, and contemptuous of any human worldview but their own. Like Crichton, anybody whose philosophy differs from their male-centric techno-libertarian/protofascist (!)* creed is cowardly, probably homosexual (the horror!) and intellectually bankrupt. Women are sex objects or Heinleinesque cartoon superwomen, usually "coincidentally" extremely young and pretty, etc.

Now, as a male techno-libertarian myself, with my own hyper-cute intellectual superwoman of a girlfriend, I find this stuff really annoying.

Yeah, the Mote books are fascinating and engrossing. But did the only human civilization worthy of respect have to be a Czarist, totalitarian, testosterone fantasyland of uniforms and commands and Very Big Guns?

I have recommended their books before, putting them forward as works like The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, where one must live with the bad to get the good, and alienated those who I recommended them to. Personally, I find myself turning to works like mid-period Brunner or Delany or the Alliance/Union/Compact books of C.J. Cherryh. All of those are just as smart, technologically fascinating, but are simply less, well, adolescent than Niven and his crowd.

Do I feel that your recommendations are wrong? No. But best that we note their failings along with their strengths. And I want to note that, oddly enough, in my experience, the farther Niven veers from current and highly specific technology, the more open-minded his characterizations become. So, predicably, Lucifer's Hammer is terrible, from its pro-fission reactor idiocies to the explicit polemics, while Ringworld acknowledges complexity and even encompasses a bit of witty satire.

* I am well aware of the seeming contradiction of my locution, "techno-libertarian/protofascist". Ain't so. Both states, as seen in their books, are variations on "guys like me must be in charge, everyone else is contemptable". The only difference is that when they are writing about far away worlds, they fantasize about the benevolent despotism that "should" be imposed while in writing about near-term Earth, they retreat to truculent rejection of all government or democracy as self-evident tools of the inferior masses "we" are trying to get free of. Neither, may I note, has the sophistication of the considered and explicit libertarianism of works like the Tom Paine Maru books that try to figure out political approaches that respect all people.