Guiding a Young Science-Fiction Fan

—B.M., St. Paul, Minn.

Many aunts (and parents) would kill to be able to ask this question; the words "voracious reader" and 13-year-old boy aren't often used in the same sentence. And "Brave New World" is science fiction, although not of the "Beam me up, Scotty" variety.

There's an odd temporal snobbery in literary criticism—fiction set either in the future or the past comes from the wrong side of the tracks. It's even been called "paraliterature." In an essay, Margaret Atwood, whose most recent novel, "The Year of the Flood," might fairly be described as science fiction, says the term "has acquired a dubious if not downright sluttish reputation" because of the "bug-eyed-monster-bestrewn-space-operas" wing of the genre. She points out there is also intellectual science fiction, or speculative fiction, as she prefers to call it—Russell Hoban's "Riddley Walker"; Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five"; Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451."

Science fiction looks easy to write, but it's most emphatically not. James Blish, a science-fiction author and critic, denounced much of it as, "Call a rabbit a smeerp stories: If they look like rabbits but you call them smeerps, that makes it science fiction." Ursula K. Le Guin said she lost interest in science fiction as a girl because it was about "starship captains in black with lean rugged faces and a lot of fancy artillery."

So Aunt B.'s mission is to gradually nudge the boy along the spectrum from Godzilla and 50-foot women to H. G. Wells, Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein and Douglas Adams.

Then he'll be ready for some great contemporary science-fiction writers: William Gibson, China Miéville, Neal Stephenson, Connie Willis, David Mitchell, Kazuo Ishiguro and Richard Powers.

Remembering an early encounter with science fiction, George Orwell wrote: "Back in the 1900s, it was a wonderful experience for a boy to discover H.G. Wells. There you were, in a world of pedants, clergymen and golfers…and here was this wonderful man who could tell you about the inhabitants of the sea, and who knew that the future was not going to be what respectable people imagined." That's a gift indeed.
By CYNTHIA CROSSEN