Young People Read Old SFF

The Projects

What's Going On Here, Anyway?

Young People Read Old SF was inspired by something award-winning author Adam-Troy Castro said on Facebook.

nobody discovers a lifelong love of science fiction through Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein anymore, and directing newbies toward the work of those masters is a destructive thing, because the spark won't happen. You might as well advise them to seek out Cordwainer Smith or Alan E. Nourse—fine tertiary avenues of investigation, even now, but not anything that's going to set anybody's heart afire, not from the standing start. Won't happen.

This is a testable hypothesis! I've rounded up a pool of younger people who have agreed to let me expose them to classic works of science fiction1 and assembled a list of older works I think still have merit. Each month my subjects will read and react to those stories; I will then post the results to this site. Hilarity will doubtless ensue!


1. I picked 1980 as my cut-off year for old-timey since it is mid-way between 2016 and 1945, while still being recent enough to cover the New Wave and the great wave of women writers in the 1960s and 1970s. It is also well before any of my volunteers were born.