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11 Adult SF Novels to Turn Teens into Genre Die-Hards
School’s out for the year, the weather has broken into full blown summer, all mosquitoes and sunburn, and I’ve become intensely nostalgic for summer vacation, those long months when I was made out of nothing but time. Man, but did I get some reading done, huddled in front of a fan on those days it was way too hot to move. Back in the 1900s, we didn’t have much in the way of young adult fiction, and I suspect that even if the YA renaissance we’ve been experiencing for the last decade were going on when I was a teen, I wouldn’t have been caught dead reading it. At 16, I was waaaaay to worldly and sophisticated for such a thing .
Instead, I read a lot of adult fiction pilfered from parents and grandparents, or borrowed from friends, or from the library. Sometimes it was wildly inappropriate for my widdle eyes—I’m pretty sure my parents did not intend for me to read the R. Crumb on the shelves—but sometimes, the adult stuff dealt with precisely the things I was grappling with as a person teetering on the cusp of adulthood. Sometimes it was age of protagonist: even though these science fictional children were going through extremes, the extremity of adolescence resonated. Sometimes they were just chock full of political, social, or philosophical commentary, the kind that seemed so vitally important when I was just beginning to make my way in the world. Science fiction is often about The Big Idea, and that largeness helped open up the world for me.
Here is a list of science fiction and fantasy that was written for grown-ups, but, if read by a precocious teen, is likely to turn them into genre readers for life. I’ve pulled from throughout the long history of SFF, deliberately avoiding obvious choices (Ender’s Game). It should not be assumed that all these novels are “clean”: these are written for adults, and so there’s the possibility of cussing, drug use, sexual situations, and violence. Parental discretion is advised
The olden days: War of the Worlds by H.G Wells
This late Victorian novel was one of the very first alien invasion stories, and has enjoyed enduring popularity (like so many of Wells’ books) in numerous adaptions. My grandfather’s sisters were taken in by the radio play in 1938, presented as news bulletins from an ongoing invasion, and called my grandpa in a panic. Mars attacks! He had a good laugh at them, pointing out it was time for the Orson Wells radio show, and there was no way Orson Wells was the only person covering an alien invasion. As will become a refrain on this list, the original H.G. Wells book is incredibly anachronistic, both in terms of science, and in the concerns of late Victorian English society. But one of the reasons it endures are the themes of colonization and invasion, which, in the hundred plus years since Wells wrote, have been borne out, unfortunately.
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The ’50s: Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov
Really, just about any of Asimov’s half a thousand novels could be read by kids, as he tends to thought experiments written in clean prose. The first three Foundation novels are iterations of the idea of psychohistory, a fictional scientific discipline that seeks to predict the future. The idea is that no single individual’s actions can be predicted, but as a group, humanity is mathematically predictable. In the first novel, the inventor of psychohistory prognosticates the oncoming collapse of the Galactic Empire. He can’t stop it—humanity is large, and he is just one man—but he can try to lessen the duration of the dark age to come. He sets up the Foundation as stewards of the future, and the later novels are about how that doesn’t exactly work out. As he does in I, Robot, Asimov takes a few foundational axioms and runs them to their logical and illogical conclusions. He’s so deliberate as a writer that you feel smart keeping up with him.
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The ’60s: Dune by Frank Herbert
I had a massive crush on Herbert as a young person, and read just about everything he set to paper. Dune is unquestionably his masterpiece: a far-future space opera and bildungsroman. Fourteen-year-old ducal heir Paul Atreides relocates with his family to Arrakis, the first move in a complicated court game that spans the galaxy. It seems astonishing to me now that I completely missed the not-very-subtle allegory about the Middle East and oil production—the universe gets a finite, absolutely necessary resource from the titular planet—but likely I was too busy reeling from the absolute barrage of cool ideas and awesome characters. I was definitely going to be a Bene Gesserit when I grew up.
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Bonus ’60s: The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
I was going to keep this list to science fiction, but when I asked my daughter what grown-up book she’d add, she got very, very excited about The Last Unicorn. Her entry point for this novel is the Rankin/Bass cartoon from the ’80s, which is actually aimed at children (despite being utterly bizarre), but the book truly isn’t. (Sidebar: the film’s animation team would end up becoming the core members of Studio Ghibli; squee.) Beagle’s novel is a winning mix of meta-commentary about folklore, deliberate anachronism, and heart-breaking poignancy. For sure, my daughter isn’t getting all that (she’s 8), but the story is so wonderful it doesn’t even matter. She also has the advantage of being too young to understand why I burst into tears at the end: even happy endings can have sad ones within them.
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The ’70s: The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
George Orr is a young man in what was then a future America—the year is 2002—and he has a unique ability: when he has what he calls “effective” dreams, he changes the nature of reality. Because they are dreams, he cannot direct them, so there are often devastating consequences, and he fears them. He is remanded to a psychiatrist, who, though initially skeptical, seeks to direct the changes in the world through manipulating George. The psychiatrist’s tinkering with reality fairly rapidly bends narcissistic and grandiose. This is an intense, philosophical novel, but one grounded in individual character and relationships. The way George navigates his dreams, his reality, and the troubling intersection of the two feels pertinent to the often paralyzing opportunity of adolescence.
The ’80s: Young Miles by Lois McMaster Bujold
Young Miles is actually an omnibus collecting the first two novels and a short story about the titular Miles Vorkosigan, but together, they constitute an arc. Miles is the son of two truly great people, the irrepressible Cordelia Naismith and Aral Vorkosigan, and seeks to follow in his father’s very large footprints. He joins the same military academy, but ends up washing out due to a congenital condition that makes his bones fragile. From there, he has to find a way to explore his talents in a society that actively represses people with physical disabilities. Young Miles is often light and fun, with really funny dialogue, but there is an undercurrent of more serious themes that will resonate with teens: how will I be like my parents, and how can I find a different way where I’m not? How can I use my limitations?
Bonus ’80s: Count Zero by William Gibson
This is the novel to read for its anachronism. Gibson somewhat famously coined the term cyberspace, and in the Sprawl trilogy he tried to imagine what the internet would look like well before it existed. Oh baby, is it a fascinating place. Count Zero is actually the second of the books, but Gibson’s trilogies tend to be loose, and I think this one is better suited to teen readers. There are three plotlines that range from up and down BAMA—the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, aka the Sprawl—to near orbit, out into the consensual hallucination of the Matrix. A number of the principles (notably Bobby) are young people who so desperately wants to rate in the illicit world of console jockeys that they make some very questionable choices. As a teen myself, I was taken with the story of the boxmaker, which I shall not spoil, but certainly still informs some of my understanding of art and commerce.
The ’90s: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
Many of Butler’s novels have young adult protagonists, but she deals in themes that are often pretty dark. (Her vampire novel, Fledging, is like the anti-Twilight in all ways, and I’m not sure I’m done freaking out about it.) Parable of the Sower is no different, but there’s glimmer there, right over the horizon. Lauren Olamina lives in a future California where the government and environment have all but collapsed. She’s convinced that the only way to save the human race is to leave the planet, and she’s codified this into something called Earthseed: a blueprint for humanity’s redemption. Lauren is sometimes a troubling protagonist, and it often feels like we’re reading about the early life of a cult leader, but her strange optimism in the face of truly large obstacles is fascinating. (And really, given the option, I’d join her cult over the bleak world she inhabits.) Probably better for older teens, as mid-apocalypse America is often grim and ugly.
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The Aughts: Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
So, this might not seem like the best fit for kiddos, as its protagonists are all over the age of 75, but Scalzi’s romping military SF could make great summer vacation reading. On this future Earth, people can join the galactic military at retirement age instead of actually retiring, at which point they are given shiny new bodies and a head full of sweet tech. The downside is, they can never return to Earth, becoming colonists on worlds their wars help carve out. The book follows John Perry through boot camp and out into the fray. For those of us who have biked around the block a couple times, there’s nothing exactly new here—I can feel the influences from Heinlein to Haldeman—but it’s a great catalogue of the history of military SF, with a lot of casually tossed off ideas that aren’t as casual as they might appear. Appropriately, Scalzi also understands the value of a juvenile sense of humor.
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The Teens: The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord
The Best of All Possible Worlds feels very original Star Trek, with mannered near-Vulcans rubbing elbows with more pluralistic Federation types. As the novel opens, the Sadiri home world is destroyed; the only Sadiri left are the ones off-world at the time. Due to a number of factors, most of them are men. An ambassador comes to Cynus Beta in order to investigate possible lost Sadiri colonies, and is paired with a local, Grace, to guide him through her world. This is a pure road trip novel, stopping off to visit a number of various sub-cultures, but the stakes are high: if they can’t find a solution, Sadiri culture is going to die off. It’s about the big questions of society and culture, written in the most personal of ways.
Right now: Nova, by Margaret Fortune
Sixteen-year-old Lia Johansen is being repatriated from a prisoner of war camp, a goodwill gesture from one interplanetary empire to another. She makes it through security when the countdown timer actives in her head: she’s a genetically engineered bomb, set to blow in 36 hours. When the countdown timer inexplicably stops, she had to start living as the actual Lia Johansen, who has friends on the space station, a life and a history. Her purpose becomes muddy, confusing: if she thinks like Lia, moves like Lia, is she on some level Lia? Nova is a situational extreme, a tug of war between purpose and personality, that can stand in quite easily for the undecided ambitions of our formative years. I have lit my candle at both ends…
What books would you give to an SFF-loving teen?