Young Adult Award winning sci-fi

YA SKULL SESSION: EXPLORE AWARD-WINNING SCI-FI!

Science fiction literature is a fantastic platform on which to explore points of view, with its characteristic ability to explore themes ranging from morality of war, genetic experimentation, dystopias, and countless other social issues.  The genre has become increasingly popular in Young Adult literature circles, most recently with the popularity of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, James Dashner’s The Maze Runner, and James Patterson’s Maximum Ride, to name a choice few.  Character focus, as in The Hunger Games, is often on children, but the age-range is endlessly explored and applied.  Here is magnetic appeal for teens: characters of their age in fantastic situations that are often full of drama but many times credible; with adult characters, teens have the advantage of witnessing a possible adult self making life-changing decisions, at times visceral and ruinous.  Authors have long explored the morals of present-day society, its governing bodies, choices of the past, social ecology, and cultures.  Here are three classic examples, all of which won the Hugo Award for best Science Fiction Book of the Year.

Let’s start with a familiar title of late: Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card, brought to screen in 2013.  Published in 1985, it’s the first in the Ender Wiggin 

series of eight novels.  Andrew “Ender” Wiggin is a young prodigy living on an Earth that is threatened by extraterrestrial beings called Buggers.  As a way of mustering a competent and effective military, children are raised playing simulated war games and monitored continually.  This internal monitor tracks their aptitude for war strategy and military leadership.  Young Ender is selected, among others, to train for the upcoming battle.  His natural expertise in simulated war strategy and ability to organize his fellows into an effective unit attract attention, earning him the leading role (the General, if you will) of Earth’s child prodigy soldiers.  None of the children, however, are privy to the grand plan of their training; the repercussions are devastating.  Ender’s Game raises questions regarding personal privacy, exploitation of children, national security, and war as a means of keeping this security – all topics that were, are, and promise to remain hot.

Another sci-fi classic brought to screen (numerous times) is

Robert A Heinlein’s Starship Troopers.  

Also focused on waagainst alien bugs, Heinlein writes as Johnny Rico, an older

teen who enlisted as an interplanetary soldier.  The plot

recounts Rico’s time as a mega-soldier (think Iron Man)

in this war against the Bugs, relating his experiences on an

external and  internal levels.  The story is not all action, inviting

a larger audience and deep discussion.  Heinlein is not afraid to

use this novel as a platform for strongly stating his opinions on

the morals and philosophy of war, military order, capital

punishment, and reigns of terror and force.

Lastly, I will tell you about A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M Miller. 

The oldest of the three, published in 1959, the story is no less current. 

Earth has suffered a nuclear holocaust and humanity is clinging to life in several disconnected and often warring regions; the story is told in three successive spaces in time meant to reflect actual times in history.  At the heart of the plot are the monks of the Order of Saint Leibowitz, striving to preserve the remnants of civilization.  They spend their days recording, sometimes sharing, and protecting the history of the human race.  Like Ender’s Game and Starship Troopers,

Leibowitz has an atmospheric and world-building story line, but Miller deftly crafts his novel close to the dark inner-workings of the human heart.  The end times, he suggests, are brought about the selfish, clutching, power-hungry actions of humanity, and it is from this angle that he spins a bleak and chillingly realistic tale of a ruined Earth.  Teens will remember this book as one of the most striking they’ve encountered.

All three of these novels are bound to provoke lively discussion, if only in one’s mind, of the morals of weapons and war, using war as a means of security, the effects of war on the individual and populace, and causes of human suffering.  Though science fiction is, in name, fiction, the questions is raises and emotions it evokes are very much real.

More oldies but goodies of the Sci-Fi lit world recommended for YA’s:

1984, by George Orwell (1949)

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley (1932)

A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess (1962)

Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury (1953)

Out of the Silent Planet, by C. S. Lewis (Space Trilogy #1) (1938)

A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs (Barsoom series #1) (1917)

3.6.2015 E K Henry