About the Science Fiction Booklist

Information in the List

The Science Fiction Book Store now serves as a book list with annotations for lesson topics each book can enrich. Please remember that I am continuously reading more!

Look for lessons and essays on using science fiction to teach and for comments on my favorites in my blogs, and in this website. Essays and lessons will be listed in the Essay List.

Read the comments below to get an idea of why the books in the book store are considered suitable for youth.

I make no special effort to include books/media published as YA/rated for youth unless I have read/watched and enjoyed it. Librarians and publishers have already screened these. My purpose is to locate the works not normally listed for youth and to share the works that I would use in my classrooms. Since I taught science (I am now retired), the list is skewed towards science concepts, but there is plenty of ethics and sociology (which includes politics and government) in the mix.

Eventually, I will make a list that can be printed out. That list will be added to the sci fi essays list when it becomes available.

My Criteria

All of the books on this list have been read by myself or another teacher and have been judged to be appropriate for juvenile readers.  

Books with the occasional mild profanity, and/or violence (Is violence ever mild?) are marked and often ddiscussed so that you can decide whether to suggest the book to an older student.  The same with sex, which in all cases is obliquely referred to, not described.  However, sometimes a romantic relationship includes sex out of marriage.  In this case, comment will alert you. 

I have read and enjoyed the majority of these personally.  If you have any doubts about recommending books to your students, check with your school librarian to see if these conditions of screening the books are adequate. 

None of these books are any more explicit in profanity, sex or violence than are the movies portraying the books written by John Griffith or Tom Clancy. You will notice that the books by Tom Clancy were not included because they are too violent for this list and contain more profanity than I find acceptable to recommend for students (and because they are not really science fiction). I make this remark so that you will have a better feel for the judgements that I made in making this list.

The Booklist

Where is the list? I started listing my favorite authors on this page. I then knew that the list would be extremely long. And I wanted to make the books available to you.  I did this:  I used my affiliate links to complete the list.  All of the books on this page are books on the list.

I apologize for the commercialism, but the books each have instructional value. They will stimulate discussion of issues on science and technology, citizenship and government, ethics and morals that are the crux of good teaching. They will offers conceptualization of science and tech in action that can be used as examples for referring to science principles and problems. They will challenge the reader as the reading level is usually 11th grade readability.

Scan the page. I do not expect you to buy. Feel free to link to Amazon, the source of the creatives, to read abstracts and comments on the books.

Know that unless you sign-in to amazon.com, you will be an anonomous browser in the store with only temporary cookies set. If you sign in, Amazon will set tracking cookies.