A Seed Saver's Garden

[Blue-Jay]

Curious - did space opera supplant the phrase 'science fiction'? If so, why?

No ! Space Opera released a self title album in 1973. Unfortunately for them the album went nowhere. I liked many of tunes on the album and I still have the original copy I purchased. LOL !

 

[flowerbug]

...
Of all the titles that are in the above posts, is there any that you think are especially good for young adults or conversely not a good fit for that age group, 12-15?

fantasy: The Hobbit i'd consider required reading for a geeky kid who's into history and has some imagination. if they get through that then the 3 books after are also worth the read but harder for some kids. to me it was like a breath of fresh air because i love detailed history and world building kinds of imagination so i felt like i was coming home.

then you get to the Silmarillion which is more written from a more historical perspective but what really caught me too were the appendixes to the three books. that was the kind of reading i also enjoyed.

then after that i read anything anyone wrote about them including the Lost Tales and the entire series about the writing of and ... i've now long forgotten almost all of it. my noodle got full and needed to recycle...

science fiction: Dune for sure. i think anyone who likes detailed and expansive reading will get into that plus i love the ecological perspective. as a 10yr old i thought it was great and wished it had been a few hundred pages longer. the books after that one are also good and get strange but not as good, like many series things can go in strange directions.

like my other favorite author who hasn't finished a book in his series yet and everyone wants to strangle him for not getting it done. well, ok, i don't, but i'd like to read the last book before i kick the bucket.

and so on.

as for worrying about age appropriate, don't, kids will either not get it and won't care too much, but when "That Age[tm]" hits they'll start to get it and probably already know everything i mean c'mon it's not too hard to extrapolate from what animals do to humans... i don't think trying to protect them does any real good in the end. i knew more than both of my parents by the age of 9 than they did by the time they were 18. Mom's full "sex education lecture" was "Girls have indoor plumbing and Boys have outdoor."

anyways, it won't matter too much if they're exposed to things because they'll get exposed to it eventually. to me the important thing is that they know they are loved and that they can talk to you about anything.

my Mom though has a funny story about my grandmother asking her what a homosexual was. so she made it 70 or more years and 13 babies and managed to not catch on, but she was a busy little beaver... we still miss her.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

i also have to admit that i like a lot of Orson Scott Card's books, starting with Ender's Game is a huge list of writings. i'm not as keen on the later books, but oh well, Enders Game and the next several books in that series are also rereads for me. he has a lot of other books too besides science fiction. the religion stuff i can not worry too much about.

As I have said earlier, I am mad at Orson Scott Card for refusing to write the last Alvin Maker book. I know he no longer needs the money, but leaving us all in the lurch doesn't seem fair.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Of all the titles that are in the above posts, is there any that you think are especially good for young adults or conversely not a good fit for that age group, 12-15?

I also recommend Tad Williams Tailchaser's Song. It's sort of the Lord of the Rings, only with cats.
If you want to start them on Sci-Fi/space opera stuff, there's the Tripods Trilogy (plus the prequel) By John Christopher. That's basically YA. Though you may need to explain some of the early confused words of "Zhan Pole" (it takes a while to realize the problem is that everyone else is British, and he is, and speaks, French.) Oh and you may have to let them read P.B. Shelly's poem "Ozymandias" as well.

 

[flowerbug]

As I have said earlier, I am mad at Orson Scott Card for refusing to write the last Alvin Maker book. I know he no longer needs the money, but leaving us all in the lurch doesn't seem fair.

sometimes things don't really turn out how you'd hoped. personally, i think the series could have been left a book or two earlier. anyways perhaps it was too close to Mormonism in the end for him to write it to the conclusion you're thinking of. i can't say. i have not reread that one for a long time. the first book is the best as usual...

and then there are the monster fantasy series that nobody has mentioned here like _The Wheel of Time_ and _Game of Thrones_, definitely for more adult readers (the latter espcially), but my own take on GOT was it was tedious and i'd not read it again. the Wheel of Time sadly had to be finished by someone else who just didn't do it justice. hard to fill shoes like that. but then here i am writing posts on a gardening group so what do i know?

 

[Pulsegleaner]

sometimes things don't really turn out how you'd hoped. personally, i think the series could have been left a book or two earlier. anyways perhaps it was too close to Mormonism in the end for him to write it to the conclusion you're thinking of. i can't say. i have not reread that one for a long time. the first book is the best as usual...

and then there are the monster fantasy series that nobody has mentioned here like _The Wheel of Time_ and _Game of Thrones_, definitely for more adult readers (the latter espcially), but my own take on GOT was it was tedious and i'd not read it again. the Wheel of Time sadly had to be finished by someone else who just didn't do it justice. hard to fill shoes like that. but then here i am writing posts on a gardening group so what do i know?

I think Brian Stableford actually did a pretty decent job finishing for Jordan (better than Eoin Coulfer did with Douglas Adams, whose books really didn't NEED a final volume). The real problem is that Jordan took so damn long that he NEEDED a follow up writer. Stableford was left with an outline that was so massive he needed THREE books to get through it (and Wheel of Time Books are long as is).
But The Wheel of time is NOT something to go into casually, not the least reason being that, unless you have a photographic memory, making sense of any book usually involved re-reading EVERY book that came before it, since characters and plots can pop up from books ten or twelve volumes back without warning. To tell the truth I never actually "read" any of them (I listened to them all on unabridged audio book, which had its own problems.) Apart from a few fun scenes I imagined for near the end of the book, and some guesses about what happened after the last volume, I don't usually think about it.

Game of Thrones is going to be even worse, since it is doubtful that GRRM will either finish himself OR leave any sort of outline, so if someone does take up the mantle later, they are going to be going in TOTALLY blind.

Oh, forgot one other funny one, Robert Asprin's MYTH books.

 

[meadow]

Definitely read them yourself first, especially if it is a world/society building type. The mores will be absorbed by those developing minds.

That is not an issue with LOTR, and I don't recall Tailchaser's Song as having anything problematic (but it's been decades since I've read it). GOT is forget it territory, but at least it isn't blatant indoctrination like some other titles. I can't recall the name of the series I was reading as a teen, but it gave me some pretty messed up views. Yeah. Read them yourself first.

DH read LOTR out loud to our children. I never made it past the first couple of sentences as I'd fall sound asleep... childhood training from my father reading to me at bedtime!

 

[Zeedman]

Of all the titles that are in the above posts, is there any that you think are especially good for young adults or conversely not a good fit for that age group, 12-15?

I concur with Dune; I read that at 17, and was really drawn into it... but agree that the sequels are not as good. I concur with E. E. Smith's "Lensman" series as well. Many of Orson Scott Card's scifi & fantasy books are suitable for young readers (although the more recent "Ender" series books, which I just finished, might be too deep). The whole Ringworld series by Larry Niven is great (although you might want to look up "rishathra" first ) as is the related "Fleet of Worlds" books in the same universe. Alan Dean Foster's "Flinx" series (a big, entertaining series, with a great conclusion!). The "Uplift" series by David Brin. Andre Norton wrote a lot of very enjoyable scifi & fantasy that is very Y.A. oriented.

I should probably stop there, that might be enough to last until they are 18 & beyond. It might even take that long to track these all down, since some are out of print. My local library had the complete"Fleet of Worlds" series.

 

[Artorius]

I was and am a fan of the Forgotten Realms series. Even one bean outcross I tentatively named Drizzt Seeds are very shiny, black with a white spot at the end. If I have some space left, I'll plant it this year.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Alan Dean Foster's "Flinx" series (a big, entertaining series, with a great conclusion!).

With Foster, you sort of need to read the peripherals to get the full effect of the Flinx novels. It helps to read the books on the founding of the Human/Thranx alliance to get the whole system in perspective, and Skua September's appearance in Flinx in Flux is a lot better to understand if you have already read the Icerigger Trilogy. I always wondered why he stopped writing stories in that universe. There could be some interesting things there (for example, since, by the time Tran Ky-Ky goes through it's next warm cycle, the Tran will have presumably started traveling in space, there are probably going to be THREE kinds of them, Cold Weather, Golden Saia, and an intermediate form (with the cold weather's heavy coat, but the Saia's lack of chiv and dan, since neither would be much use on a space ship or any other planted that DOESN'T have a nearly universal frozen ocean like Tran Ky-Ky.)