All a bit of a think-tank, sure, and “Historia Argonauticus,” “Odyssey,” “Iliad” and “Kleopatra & Cæsar” are admittedly sorta long stories, but the others are grouped as short stories, all great for bedtime and evoking heroic dreams.

As an afterthought, I recall mentioning this book here, about 13 years ago, and author James Hogan actually logged in on The Zone the thank us for the mention.

My Middle school library had shelves of crappy sci-fi. The nail in the coffin was a book about a kid who traveled to mars in a spaceship he built in his backyard. He got there and discovered he could breathe the atmosphere just fine.

Right about that time I discovered Larry Bond, Tom Clancy, etc. I didn’t get back into sci-fi until I had burned out on and given up Clancy as his politics became more transparant and Limbaughish within his books. Interestingly this coincided with my discovery of the MSNBC Space/Science bulletin Boards which is part of the HZ pedigree. That resparked a desire to read good sci-fi and I got a lot of suggestions where to start from these message boards.

In science fiction you travel to the far future, you go to other planets, you inhabit civilizations and cultures totally different from ours, some of them deliberately devised by their authors to be totally grotesque because they are trying to make a point. This only sharpened my sense of the arbitrary and artificial nature of the rules and regulations which we use to navigate social space. To me, a high school football game was pure tribal ritual, and no one else seemed to understand that. God does not make the rules, we do, even if we don’t realize it.

I was culturally well prepared to understand and survive in the Vietnam-era military and hippy dippy college in the 1970s, two other counter-culture environments which clashed with the button-down 1950s of my childhood. Reading Sci-Fi helped me get through that relatively intact. I can’t think of a better literature to educate a youth, except perhaps well-written historical novels.

Good luck with your kids, you’re doing the right thing.

Mainly I’m looking for books that I can read to him. I’ve read to my kids nearly every night from the time they were born. My oldest (14) no longer lets me, but my 11 and 8 yr old still insist on it which is fine by me. Sometimes I read to the kids individually or if it seems like a book they both would like I pull them in together. This is preferred since I get to bed sooner.

The kids read on their own too, and we pretty much let them find their way as much as possible. Not a big fan of Captain Underpants or Diary of a Wimpy kid books, but my son likes them.

If I get tired of a book or notice my kids aren’t really into it, we decide whether to scrap it. We’ve read all of the Michael Buckley Sister’s Grimm books which are pretty good, but sometimes I really had to slow down and explain what was going on. Starting The Lemony snickets book with the 11 yr old. Not quite sure what to expect there.

Sometimes books are just too awful for me to read. I’ve outright banned all Puppy Place type books and it looks like crappy Star Wars books is next on the chopping block.

Love the list I’m collecting here everybody. Thanks.

Well, the only way I was going to find out what happened to Sawyer and Finn was to read it myself, and I had time. I literally learned to read then. Went on ’til we moved into the city when I was in the fifth grade, and by then I regarded books as great friends.

May not have happened if my folks weren’t leaving an 8 year old alone in the country all that time.’

After I was 10 I spent a lot of time with one or the other of two bachelor uncles, much of that in the country. Thank God for the books.

Depends on the 8-year-old. I found my own books as a kid by haunting the school library. Nobody was there to tell me something was “too old” for me, or that I might get “wrong” ideas from it. My librarian or parents never looked at a book I took out from the library and said “you shouldn’t read that.”

If your kid likes to read, take him to a library or bookstore and let him browse. You can help him find specific sections.

A few favorites from my childhood (some still sitting on my shelf):

The Mushroom Planet books by Eleanor Cameron.

“Spaceship Under the Apple Tree” series by Louis Slobodkin.

“The Enormous Egg” by Oliver Butterworth.

Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Bradbury. Heinlein’s “The Star Beast” is great for kids. Classic SF by Wells and Verne. If something was too complex or boring for me, generally I just skimmed over it to see where the story went. I found out on later re-readings that I missed quite a bit from my childhood favorites.

Of course, I read a lot of fantasy as a kid, too, but that’s another story.

My own published book (Castle Falcon) is quite long, and geared towards older kids, but your mileage may vary. My second book “Roger Mantis” would be more fun for an eight-year-old but it’s still unpublished.