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?"

Dragon's Egg by Robert Forward

[PrinceOfStorms]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon's_Egg [wikipedia.org] is pretty good in terms of science, and also interesting from a social/evolutionary perspective.

Biology relevant Hard-SF...

[bluephone]

Niven and Pournelle's "Mote in God's Eye" and it's sequel "The Gripping Hand" are very very good hard SF books, and the Moties are created by extrapolating what their biology would dictate their society be like, not just making talking plants or goldfish in spacesuits. Quite well done.

"Andromeda Strain". Classic. The original "Jurassic Park". Also very very good. Both quite good biology based books. Sure JP is a little loose with cloning and DNA recombination, but that's the SF part.

Off the top of my ehad, those are some great bio-related hard-SF books.

SF is about people more than about science

[GroeFaZ]

You don't learn Science from an SF book, because you never know (if you're not already educated) what laws the author bent for the sake of the story. If you get hold of a good SF book, it is always about people and their interactions in what-if scenarios, even if the science may be bunk or too far off to be of any value today. The most an SF book can do for science and technology is to spark interest in it. That's not a bad thing at all, however, SF books should be considered an addendum to Ethics or sociology, not science. Considering that, I'd recommend "Never let me go" by Kazuo Isiguro, ISBN 0-571-22414-8

Asimov, Dune

[SanityInAnarchy]

Asimov gets bonus points for having actually written nothing but nonfiction science books for a number of years.

Fantastic Voyage (2 especially) might be cool, too. Keep in mind, the movie sucked -- Asimov was hired to do the novelization and to be a scientific adviser, and he did advise them to change the deminaturization sequence, as miniturized humans should not be able to breathe unminaturized air.

Dune. Not particularly accurate with respect to our own universe, but wow, what a thoroughly done and rigorously consistent universe he created.

But there's lots of fun scifi stuff out there. Stay away from Star Wars, even most Star Trek (technobabble). Also, if you can't find anything perfect, take something close enough and play a game of spot-the-inconsistency. Also consider videogames, movies, TV. Play with comic book physics (think "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" [rawbw.com]), and certainly everyday scenarios.

Get the kids interested enough that they bring you ideas, so you don't have to go to Slashdot for them.

David Brin - MSc Physics, PhD Phil., Hugo, Nebula

[Cordath]

David Brin is one of the very rare sci-fi authors out there who actually has the background to deal with hard science and the ability to write compelling characters and plots. He has several award winning books (Hugos, Nebulas, etc.) under his belt, but even his lesser works are good reads. While "Startide Rising" is a classic and an absolute no-brainer, a lesser work like "Glory Season" might hold special interest for an all-girl class. (The book is set on a isolated colony where humans tinkered with biology a little and created a female dominated society, but it's done a bit differently than most other attempts at the same sort of story.)

And Greg Egan

[Malfourmed]

As well as Brin, and I guess Bear, Benford and Forward (some of the better-known "hard SF" authors around), I recommend Australian writer Greg Egan. Heck he even supplies technical notes [netspace.net.au] to his books on his home page.

Though my favourite Egan works tend to be more philosophical than scientific (eg the short story "Learning To Be Me").

Re:For an all girls school...

[apathy maybe]

Incest, strange political systems, and so on? (OK, the moralistic issues raised are good, but see below)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinlein [wikipedia.org]

While I enjoy reading some of his work, it is hardly that good. Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, are both better writers in my opinion. Their work is more consistently good and they do not go all over the place (see for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cat_Who_Walks_Thr ough_Walls [wikipedia.org] for a story that ends up plain weird).

Some of his non-fiction is worth a read, but Clarke's is better (see the famous prediction of the satellite or the first essay in 1984, Spring: a Choice of Futures where he talks of something like the OLPC).

Talking about the genre of SF, it is one of the great things about it. Being able to have any other genre of fiction, but place it in a different universe is one of the great attractions. It also shows how good many SF authors are. Anyone can write a story where they don't have to explain the background or history of the location where the story is set. SF writers have to explain this, in text! Without disrupting the flow of the story.
Basically, I would say, unless you like weird writing that goes all over the place (drifting into fantasy for a lot of the later work), you wouldn't go with Heinlein.

Re:Science.... fiction

[Cicero382]

Oh, I don't know. For me the best ones are those that assume some fictional aspect of science, but don't mess with the rest.

A good example is "Neutron Star" by Larry Niven. It assumes hyperdrive technology and a (supposedly, that's the point of the story) invulnerable spaceship hull. After that the physics is spot on - and quite educational.

I would also suggest "The Mote in God's Eye" as a good example. I would go as far as to say that this is the best of the genre - ever.

BTW. Some have referred to the sequel as being "Gripping Hand"; when I bought it in hardback in England it was titled "The Moat Around Murchenson's Eye". Just so you know...

Re:Biology relevant Hard-SF...

[Bastard of Subhumani]

Niven and Pournelle's "Mote in God's Eye" and it's sequel "The Gripping Hand" are very very good hard SF books, and the Moties are created by extrapolating what their biology would dictate their society be like

While this is true (don't get me wrong, the books are among my favourites) they do rely a bit on 'magic' like the Alderson drive & the Langston(?) shield. Pournelle's solo effort "Lucifer's Hammer", about the lead up to and aftermath of a comet impact, is well worth a read.

Ursula K. Le Guin

[mbone]

For an all girls class, you might start with The Left Hand of Darkness [amazon.com].

Scientifically accurate movies

[goombah99]

Comedy:
Real Genius had some excellent science advisors. The Laser he builds and the curves he draws to explain it are right for an Excimer Laser. The other stunts short of the grand finale actually happened at caltech so they are all true, even the contest entry winner.

Cinema Verite:
2001 set the high bar that has never been matched.

Primer is novel because it captures how scientist actually talk to each other, and make old equipment do new tricks. Also the time travel aspect of it actually would work--if you were a photon who divided into a particle and anti-particle--so it's fair to say this is the first time travel movie that's does not entirely violate physical laws or postulate a mechanism that does not exist. Of course the plot will make your head explode and humans are not photons.

Solaris has a lot going for it.

as for reading material: Larry Niven which makes poor adult sci fi, I found very entertaining as a high schooler. And it strives for good science where it can and still be compelling to read (rocket ships can't take forever to get somewhere!).

Clarke, Heinlein, Asimov

[spaceyhackerlady]

Rendezvous with Rama, Imperial Earth and The Fountains of Paradise remain some of my favourite Clarke books, and some of my favourite books, period. The current edition of Glidepath, an otherwise-excellent novel, is marred by lousy OCR and incompetent proofreading.

For high-school students, some of Heinlein's juveniles might still fit the bill, even if they were written 50 years ago. Have Space Suit, Will Travel holds up remarkably well, while students can debate Podkayne of Mars. None of these authors were that good at female characters at first, though they got better with time - who can forget Bliss ("Don't I look human?") or Dors, who wasn't what she seemed, or Calindy, who tasted like honey?

I just finished re-reading the Foundation novels. They illustrate a couple of the most important ideas in science fiction: if it's happened before, it will happen again, and consider the consequences. The whole series is about the decline and fall of an empire. A galactic one, this time.

...laura

Re:Science.... fiction

[garysears]

Larry Niven's Ringworld or Ringworld Engineers has an appendix that describes the physics of a ringworld. Very eye-opening.

Re:Science.... fiction

[teflaime]

The university is not a good place to gain a firm understanding of genre, as, especially now adays, most writers in the university environment seem to be focused on one of three genres: magic realism (which has nothing to do with magic, but is rather a term first used to define the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who is highly immitated, where the plot is shrouded in confusing perceptive realities belonging to highly questionable narrators), historical fiction (which, while there is a place for it, tends to be either boring or boring and pendantic, as the academic writers of this genre are usually using it to express dull political opinions that they think should be taken as truisms...and should not be mistaken for alternate history which is a scifi subgenre), and postmodern fiction, which is just silly attempts to subvert story telling and plot to random verbage barages on limited topics and really only servers to cover up the fact that these writers just can't tell stories. In the publishing industry (outside of academic houses, which are often run by university professors), there is no such genre as "speculative fiction". Publishing houses don't like overly broad statements like that because they tend to want to focus their marketing to specific groups and maximize the advertising dollar. The only true industry places that I see the term used regularly are Locus, which is a trade magazine and covers all of the publishing under the whole broad spectrum (though they refer to individual published works with their marketing genre) and the odd anthology that is often published at a University press, and thus carries the phrase "An anthology of Speculative Fiction" because no one wants to lose their "university professor snob" card;). Considering that there are still three profitable publishing houses (yeah, they are owned by mega houses, but they are still run as seperate publishers), in this day of people who can't or won't read, that specialize in science fiction, fantasy, and horror (Tor, Baen, Ace), and that the 3 largest gatherings about books are the World Science Fiction Convention, the British Fantasy convention, and the World Horror Fiction convention, I think it is safe to say that the only people who really sneer at science fiction any more are the professors who hypocritally will accept it if you call it speculative fiction.