short science fiction stories for kids to expand horizons

December 5, 2020 12:11 AM

What are some collections or individual science fiction stories that are ideal for a 10 year old, and aren't full of war/rape/dead girlfriends/50s gender roles? Especially looking for stories with radical changes in perspective or which promote empathy for others.
posted by benzenedream to Media & Arts (13 answers total)

Best answer: Ted Chiang. He has two collections and they are both great. A ten year old might not get 100% of the content, and some of the stories are very emotionally affecting, but I can’t think of any that contain something I would worry about sharing with a week-grounded ten year old.

Ursula K Leguin. She wrote many short stories. Some do have war but they definitely don’t glorify it. Some do have gender roles but they are often subverted. One of her best known series is Earthsea; the early books are definitely kid friendly but about the fourth work there are some pretty rough discussions of abuse (as in a character who had been severely maltreated shows up).
posted by nat at 2:19 AM on December 5, 2020 [6 favorites]

Shaun Tan- The Lost Thing.
Gorgeous drawings, sci fi aesthetic, empathetic protagonist.
posted by freethefeet at 3:17 AM on December 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

My daughter devoured The Lunar Chronicles by Melissa Meyer
posted by gnutron at 5:31 AM on December 5, 2020

Best answer: Monica Hughes! Her books are totally age appropriate for young adults. I read them around age 10-12. She's Canadian so I don't know if people from other countries grew up with her but she's written a lot.

I recommend Invitation to the Game (1990, standalone) and the Keeper of the Isis Light which is first of a trilogy.
posted by dazedandconfused at 6:05 AM on December 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

Best answer: The further down this list you go, the more it's fantasy, but there's overlap in the middle:

Will McIntosh, "What is Eve?"
Rachael K. Jones, "Five Functions of Your Bionosaur"
Holly Black, "Ten Rules for Being an Intergalactic Smuggler (the Successful Kind)"
Rebecca Ann Jordan, "We Have a Cultural Difference, Can I Taste You?"
Susan Palwick, "Remote Presence"
Yoon Ha Lee, "The Contemporary Foxwife"
Eleanor Pearson, "Mirror Images"
Allison Mills, "If a Bird Can Be a Ghost"
Naomi Kritzer, "Field Biology of the Wee Fairies"
Perrault (Mother Goose)'s "The Fairies" re-written by Daniel Ortberg and Ursula Vernon
posted by Wobbuffet at 7:15 AM on December 5, 2020 [3 favorites]

They're a mix of fantasy and sci-fi, but I loved the Bruce Coville short story collections at that age: Oddly Enough, Odder Than Ever, and Oddest of All, as well as the collections he edited (Book of ____ [monsters, aliens, ghosts etc.]). They are definitely odd, and while I don't remember a lot of specifics, his work in general is interested in empathy and how human beings treat each other and the planet, so I'd imagine a lot of these would be the same. I don't know how easy these are to find now, though I've picked up some at garage sales and stuck them in my junior high library's collection :) Your librarian may have done the same.
posted by goodbyewaffles at 7:34 AM on December 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Naomi Kritzer! I'm really into her and her short stories are excellent.
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:56 AM on December 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

I am going to recommend a short story which appears to go against your preferences, but actually doesn't. It's Fritz Lieber's "A Pail of Air." The protagonist is a ten-year-old boy (plus). You don't find this out until the end of the story-- a change of perspective (plus). It appears to have a weak/crazy 1950s female stereotype mother in the family (minus). But wait, the father tells the boy that she isn't really crazy, that right after the world ended, she saved the whole family from dying, and that "courage is like a ball, and you pass it from one person to another for as long as you can hold it." (A fantastic metaphor and I am totally not doing it justice paraphrasing it that way.) This causes the boy to realize his mother and their reality aren't what he first thought, and promotes empathy (plus). It's full of really cool science, but 1951 science, so you can have a later discussion about how the events described wouldn't happen that way, and how scientific understanding is always progressing (plus). It has some scary themes (everyone in the world is dead but this one family after a rogue planet tears the Earth away from the sun), but nothing graphic or gory (plus). Actually, this is the point where I am going to just recommend that you go read the story and decide for yourself. It is available at Project Gutenberg, because the magazine of original publication did not renew its copyright. It's scary and has real tension (plus), but everything turns out OK with some hope in the end. I have strong feelings about this story. It has the same basic themes as Cormac McCarthy's "The Road"-- what to do with your family when the apocalypse happens and there is no hope. But told with a completely different outlook and a rather shocking refusal to just give up and die. I really like "A Pail of Air", and plug it to people whenever I can. The story has stayed in other people's minds, too-- you can find blog posts addressing the themes, the science (and how it is wrong), and so on. So it would be easy to build some stealth-homeschooling activities out of it. You'd be having a good time talking to your kid about a fun story, but still learning at the same time.
posted by seasparrow at 10:27 AM on December 5, 2020 [3 favorites]

Best answer: Not a story recommendation per se, but if you want to do some screening in an interesting way, check out the LeVar Burton Reads podcast. He reads mostly speculative fiction short stories, including a good cross section of POC authors. Could be cool to listen to with the kids (he does content warnings!) or on your own to see if you want to read them out loud.
posted by Paper rabies at 12:55 PM on December 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Excellent recommendations. One other note, my daughter really does not like physical violence especially anything with blood, so warriors having their limbs hacked off or even people striking each other in genuine anger is disturbing for her. She was ok with all the Narnia books including the White Witch killing a whole planet so as long as it's a little more abstract she's ok with it. Neverending story was also a hit, and The Wild Robot.
posted by benzenedream at 2:04 PM on December 5, 2020

Best answer: I still think about some of the stories that I read as a somewhat precocious ~10 year old in the 90s in 2041, collected by Jane Yolen.
posted by sigmagalator at 6:34 PM on December 5, 2020

Best answer: Ursula Vernon / T. Kingfisher's stories tend toward fairy-tale-ish; if that works for you, they are grade-A stories and definitely tickle the empathy, less on the Total Perspective Vortex. You can read online the title story in Toad Words and Other Stories. Summer in Orcus (novella or novel or something) is also online -- review since it might have more explicit violence than your kid is okay with.

Young Explorer's Adventure Guide is an annual collection that works for the age and I think generally goes in the direction you want, though I've only read a couple of years.
posted by away for regrooving at 12:33 AM on December 9, 2020 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Young Explorer's Adventure Guide looks awesome, I wanted to have her read a variety of voices rather than 800 pages of some trilogy. I used to love the The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror collections; one of the great features of those was that they covered both "literary" and "genre" writers with no distinction between the two, so Stephen King and Haruki Murakami would both be featured.
posted by benzenedream at 4:17 PM on December 9, 2020