The Gaming Den

Personally? Go back. Go way back.

E.E. "Doc" Smith.

I recommend the Skylark series, not starting out with Lensmen. It's some fairly good, admittedly fairly campy, fairly ancient writing. You might need to explain some of the quirks of it being written 70 years ago, but it's a fairly Buck-Rogersy, lasers-and-spaceships kind of affair. Though I'm not sure she would be interested in it just yet, I think it'd be more likely to entertain.

ckafrica wrote:I might concede that nudity is inappropriate for young children, but guns?

Why on hell is nudity a problem?
Guns and violence I could see, but why on hell nudity (or are we talking about sex?)?

But I am from Europe...

Bah. What happened to the good old 80s when you could not make a movie without guns and nudity?

Anyways, suggestions:

Simak's Way Station is good stuff that has potential to interest the kid. Although the ending is probably a bit too complex for a small child to understand, the rest was simple and straightforward as far as I remember.

Lastly, Shefner's Modest Genius, a short story which manages to capture the essence of Soviet SF in its few pages. The story is simply brilliant and should be a part of everyone's essential reading. It is also a thing the person could read at two different stages in life and see it in totally different light. Really, cannot stress enough the recommendation.

Korwin wrote:

ckafrica wrote:I might concede that nudity is inappropriate for young children, but guns?

Why on hell is nudity a problem?
Guns and violence I could see, but why on hell nudity (or are we talking about sex?)?

But I am from Europe...

I bolded my statement. North Americans are caught up on anything sexual;, it's a puritan thing I think. While I don't think that completely sheltering children (by this I'm meaning prepubescent rather than teens) for anything remotely sexual is good, explicit sexual content is something I think they can do without. Sexual consciousness will come soon enough. Mentioning that someone is naked in a book would not be a problem for me but graphic description with sexual undertones would.

But people who play roleplaying games complaining about violent entertainment is really strange to me. All my friends grew up highly exposed to graphic violent material without any ill effects that I can identify. I was playing DnD by age 6 or 7. If anything I think it has suppressed any violent tendencies to be actively engaged in violent simulations, not only as a outlet but as an educational process of recognizing consequences to my actions and decisions.

On the topic of good Sci Fi for kids:
look for some abridged versions of classic Verne and Wells, they often tell the stories using simplified modern language.

Books that dwell on graphic sexual material IS a problem for kids.

Not because there is anything especially wrong with exposing them too it, the kids will just shrug and take it in stride.

But because they pretty much will not be interested in it. So it ends up being big chunks of boring stuff that doesn't appeal to them. And you don't want that when you want to keep them interested in reading.

And while there are books that have sexual/pseudo sexual material that at least appears to be targeted to interest "child" audiences, like the dreaded Xanth novels, those are really for young teenage audiences, not you know, 4 year old girls.

Sexual material in novels is a problem for this sort of thing because mismatching your target audience will leave you with a kid who is bored and alienated from the genre and reading in general.

Much like kids subjected to the reading lists of modern English courses (fucking Bridge to Terrebitha? WTF???)

sexual and violent material is also a problem because kids of this age will emulate it as they don't have cautionary markers to prevent them from doing so.

Parents can act as these markers but this sort of stuff takes a while to imprint into them. So you read them a chapter from Xanth (which I probably won't do as I can't stand Anthony myself) and it'll stick onto them. Most of them time if I do read her something that has some sort of material such as this, I tend to auto-censor the books with a slightly changed line here or there.

Really, you don't want your kid randomly dropping things such as "I'm going to bite you, you punk." which she has said before to a playmate's mother. That was interesting as the woman took it indignantly. But it was workable.

post tl;dr, so I don't know if these have been suggested.

The Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy might be good, though I honestly don't know if the british humour would be over their head, and with the later books, you might have them trying to fly...

The Spaceman Spiff strips from Calvin and Hobbes seem like they'd be great short reads to share.

A Cynic wrote:Really, you don't want your kid randomly dropping things such as "I'm going to bite you, you punk." which she has said before to a playmate's mother. That was interesting as the woman took it indignantly. But it was workable.

*laugh* really? If I had a kid and heard them say that, I'd laugh my ass off, and possibly encourage it.

Yeah, I'm going to be an "interesting" parent.

Prak_Anima wrote:
The Spaceman Spiff strips from Calvin and Hobbes seem like they'd be great short reads to share.

A Cynic wrote:Really, you don't want your kid randomly dropping things such as "I'm going to bite you, you punk." which she has said before to a playmate's mother. That was interesting as the woman took it indignantly. But it was workable.

*laugh* really? If I had a kid and heard them say that, I'd laugh my ass off, and possibly encourage it.

Yeah, I'm going to be an "interesting" parent.

Actually it's just the woman who took it in that fashion. I found it amusing myself but the problem is that you aren't going to be around at every moment when they say stuff to others in daycare, pre-school, etc...

So unfortunately it helps to have that built in censor even if you don't believe in that sort of stuff (as I don't.)