[Sca-cooks] OOP, OT _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_

[Siegfried Heydrich]

    If you want to get kids hooked on <good> historical fiction, try Talbot
Mundy (his Tros of Samothrace series is wonderful) or Robert E. Howard (his
historical and fantasy titles). Both were glorious writers, and their
stories are straightforward and well constructed. There's no 'goody' gloss -
evil is evil, good is sometimes evil, and God has a delicious sense of
irony. Kids just eat it up. I've read some of Howard's stories to kids at
reading fairs, and they lock 'em in tighter than Barney EVER could.
    They didn't call it the Golden Age of Pulp for nuttin' . . .

    Sieggy

----- Original Message -----
> >
> >>  _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_
> >
> >The first Heinlein book I read in my young life. I was in the third or
fourth
> >grade. This was back in the day when people didn't pay as much attention
to
> >what's in School Libraries as they do now. I'm afraid it started a
lifelong
> >addiction and forever warped my character.
> >
> >Ah, would that we could still be so subversive in print....
>
> Well, maybe we can't be, via the school libraries, but you'd be
> surprised what you can do at home to prepare your own children (if
> any) for their very own warped characters.
>
> My own Evil Spawn (tm) is a little older (ten) and he's discovered an
> awful lot of interesting old books on Mom's and Dad's shelves. He
> started in on Heinlein with "Have Space Suit, Will Travel", (okay,
> not Heinlein's most radical but a good intro for kids), loved it, and
> was going to proceed, but got sidetracked and is now busy devouring
> Wellman's entire Silver John, a.k.a. John the Balladeer, mythos. I've
> actually had to look for two of them that I did not own, which were
> also out of print, and ended finally finding them at acceptable
> prices on the ebay/half.com site. Including, for the sake of
> completeness, the truly dreadful 1973 movie based on "Who Fears The
> Devil?" We're talking real MST3K stuff here, but it's almost hypnotic
> in its ability to draw in fans of the stories, with little flashes of
> gold (or silver?) among the dreck.
>
> He's also become quite fond of Diane Duane's Wizard books (written
> for teenagers, I suspect, but I actually prefer them to, say, the
> Harry Potter books), and a sprinkling of Spider Robinson's short
> stories.
>
> There's actually a nice scene in "Have Space Suit, Will Travel", in
> which the narrator's father looks at the pablum curriculum at his
> son's school, and loads him down with books to provide him with a
> proper edumakashun. This is kind of what's happening here.
>
> Adamantius
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