I’ve just been told that I get to be the first one to teach a brand new Science Fiction & Fantasy elective at my High School. I am building this class from scratch and since the students will be responsible for getting the books themselves, I have pretty much free-reign for my book choices. Great, right? Absolutely! However, I want to expand my initial book search so I wanted to enlist the Hive Mind to help with this initial salvo.
This class is an elective for 10, 11, and 12 and meets 2 or 3 times a week. I haven’t even begun the process of planning the structure of the class, but I’m thinking of doing about a novel every 3 weeks or so plus one choice novel a quarter. This is a semester course and I’m thinking of doing a quarter of fantasy and a quarter of science fiction.
My wheelhouse is primarily epic, series based, high fantasy (Malazan, Recluce, Pern, SoT). I’m not that familiar with standalone fantasy novels, and since this is a short class, I would like to probably focus on single novels (or maybe individual novels of a series that can stand alone).
I’m also much more familiar with the classic Sci-Fi canon (Asimov, Bradbury, Dick, Bova) but I’m not really well versed in current Sci-Fi.
I also am not very up-to-date on YA Sci-fi/Fantasy, so any suggestions along those lines would be greatly appreciated.
My request is the following: Please suggest books that would be great to use in a High School elective. At this point I’m not really concerned about Lexile scores so much as I am about quality and length. While I would love have the kids read a book like Reamde or Name of the Wind, those 1000 page tomes are a bit out of reach for my purposes.
Thanks in advance!
Don’t neglect Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson, etc.
There are a lot of great SF & F books that are either in the public domain or available for free, legal e-book download either from Project Gutenberg, the Baen Free Library , or other sites.
H. Beam Piper’s books are now public domain.
Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother is available to read free on his website.
Drawing as much of your curriculum as possible from free books will be a kindness to students who might otherwise not be able to afford to take your class.
I hope you have fun with it!
I agree with this, particularly about Little Brother , which would be an excellent book for OP to consider. I also think, in line with the free books, that doing some short fiction would be good for the class and the readers. In my early SF classes, I remember the impact of some really great short fiction pieces—it allows you to have something to read quickly for class and have a discussion.
If I were doing a class like this, I’d break it up by topic or subgenre. For example, these two free short stories are among the best SF I’ve ever read.
Both are excellent because of their use of non-standard viewpoint. One is first person epistolary, the other done only through dialogue. You could do a great job in combining these as in-class reads for a given day (both take under 5 min to read) while working on a longer work that also uses viewpoint in an interesting way. (I’d suggest The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms for this, but I’m not sure if the content is acceptable for the audience. Dracula is a great fallback for a classic with an interesting use of voice—and you could contrast it with Wikihistory in some very interesting ways.)
Another example would be to do dystopian, which is very big in YA because of the Hunger Games. Have them read Harrison Bergeron (my all-time favorite piece of short fiction) or something like the lottery, then read Little Brother or Uglies (both strong dystopian novels in recent years.)
For metaphoric fiction, look up Ponies. It’s another excellent, very short piece that I think your students would really get.
In the Baen Free Library posted right above, you can find a free copy of 1632, one of the foundational works of alternate history. Niven’s “All the Myriad Ways” might be a good match for that, or you could match it with Amber for multi-world connections. His Majesty’s Dragon and the Yiddish Policeman’s Union would fit really well here, as would some steampunk stories. (Hungry City Chronicles?)
Basically, I would pick a theme for every two weeks or so, get one central novel for that theme, then have a half dozen shorts to either read in-class or as additional homework. Give yourself a topic to dig into, not just a book to read.
Also, drop me a PM. I’ve got a whole stack of ARCs of Legion , one of my novellas, lying around. I could send them to you for your students.
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