Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Reader Request Week , in which you suggest the topics, and I write about them. Yes, I am your dancing monkey for the entire week! Please do not throw peanuts at me, however. They hurt my little head. I have to preface my question with a story. I mentioned that I cut my teeth on the juveniles now called Young Adult! I got a blank look in response.
Asimov, Clarke, Pohl- same thing. She thought she might have heard of Asimov⦠I thought I might cry. Do middle school kids not read science fiction any more? Does this science fiction have an expiration date? Am I hopelessly out of touch with the youth of today, and should just start yelling at them to get off my lawn? The answer: Yes, Keith, you are in fact hopelessly out of touch with the youth of today.
And be thankful, because think about it: Do you really want to have the same tastes as a bunch of 13 and 14 year olds? Like, restraining order creepy? You know it would be. So be proud of your old man crankiness.
Dude, those books are all more than 50 years old. When my then ten-year-old niece commented a few years ago that No Doubt sounded like something her mother might like, I realized that no amount of pushing and prodding would ever get her to listen to Gwen Stefani and pals thrash about, even if sonically it was right in line with what she was listening to otherwise.
I have no doubt no pun intended that it works the same way if an adult drops Star Beast on a kid these days. On the practical front, the future of 50 years ago is not the future of today, both for social and technological reasons, and kids today know it. Hell, when I read The Star Beast as a kid in the early 80s, it already felt a bit quaint, and that was more than a quarter century ago.
