The Best YA Science Fiction Book is.....

I need an exceptionally good science fiction novel for my gifted 6th graders (some reading 4-5 years above grade level) ---I wanted Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card or The Giver by Lois Lowry but it's come to my attention that the middle school teachers "own" those titles. I'm not an SF reader so help me come up with some really good suggestions.

We're reading a dozen SF short stories including Nolan, Asimov and Bradbury and want to finish up with a novel.

Tags: fiction, novel, science

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Permalink Reply by Patrick Kutkey on January 3, 2009 at 3:36pm

Go no further than The Green Book.

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Permalink Reply by Margaret on January 5, 2009 at 7:03pm

Why not approach your Middle School collegues with a proposal to teach the Giver which would then allow the Middle School teachers to teach the second and third books in Lowry's trilogy The Gathering Blue and Messenger. While its not Science Fiction Ursula LeGuin's Earth Sea Trilogy would be great for your students and introduce them to one of my very favorite SciFi authors.

A colleague and I teach the Dispossessed each spring to 11th and 12th graders. This spring we will pair this with Robert Sawyer's Calculating God and Asimov's Caves of Steel. Last spring we taught Vinge's Rainbow's End which is set in the near future and one of the two main characters is a 6th grade age girl. I didn't read it with 12 year olds in mind, but I suspect your students could read it (though it is longer than the Giver! But I bet all your students have read all the Harry Potter books so the length shouldn't be an issue.)