Science Fiction
Here are some titles for readers not afraid to venture beyond the realm of the known and comfortable. Science fiction gives writers and their audience the chance to explore not just what science is and what it can do, but to imagine what it could be, and what it might do.
Gulliver's Travels
Author: Jonathan Swift
Ages: 12 and up
Publisher: Signet Classics, 1999
Science Concepts: Magnetism, optics, science and society
Follow Gulliver on his extraordinary travels to Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa and beyond. Originally published in the early 1700s, this classic has remained a popular story through the centuries.
Excerpt:
They have observed ninety-three different comets, and settled their periods with great exactness. If this be true (and they affirm it with great confidence), it is much to be wished that their observations were made public, whereby the theory of comets, which at present is very lame and defective, might be brought to the same perfection with other parts of astronomy.
A Journey to the Center of the Earth
Author: Jules Verne
Ages: 10 and up
Publisher: Digireads.com, 2006
Science Concepts: Geological formations, layers of the Earth, volcanoes, modern science versus philosophy
Scholars have dissected Jules Verne’s classic science fiction story for over a century. It is both a story of the history of the Earth and a fantastic journey to the core of the planet. For casual readers, students and teachers, it is a fascinating tool with which to contrast fact and fiction. This book has all the elements of science fiction: It tells a good story, has a human element, contains science fact, presents something strange and unusual and uses appropriate science terminology.
Excerpt:
No, we will descend slowly, and our lungs will get used to breathing a denser atmosphere. Aeronauts eventually lack air when they climb up into the highest layers but we ourselves may perhaps have too much. But I prefer that. Let’s not waste a moment.
Paris in the Twentieth Century
Author: Jules Verne
Ages: 10 and up
Publisher: Del Ray, 1997
Science Concepts: Electromagnetism
Verne wrote his vision about what Paris would be like in the 1960's way back in 1863. The manuscript was lost for 125 years and was published upon its discovery. This is a wonderful opportunity to compare what Verne imagined with what actually came to pass.
Excerpt:
A vector tube some twenty centimeters in diameter and two millimeters thick ran the entire length of the track between the two rails; it enclosed a soft-iron disc, which slid inside it under the action of several atmospheres of compressed air provided by the Catacomb Company of Paris. This disc, driven at high speed within the tube, like a bullet in its barrel, drew with it the first car of the train. But how was this car attached to the disc inside the tube, since this disc would have no communication with the exterior? By electromagnetic force.
The War of the Worlds
Author: H.G. Wells
Ages: 12 and up
Publisher: Aerie, 2005
Science Concepts: Possibility of life on other planets; history of astronomy; survival of species
Teachers: Try playing the original Mercury Theatre of the Air broadcast of Orson Welles reading his book on Halloween to approach the story from a unique perspective. Back in 1938, on the eve of war in Europe, Americans listening to the broadcast were frightened into believing that Martians were actually invading Earth. This is one of Wells' early works, as is The Time Machine, another classic now considered science fiction.
Excerpt:
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
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For more information please contact Center Director Roxanne Hughes at hughes@magnet.fsu.edu or (850) 645-8179.
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