Finding Science Fiction and Fantasy for Female Readers #SciFiSunday
Excellent piece from earlier this year by Dara Horn in The Paris Review.
Why don’t you write anything fun? You know, like about an alternate universe or time travel or something?”
That’s my twelve-year-old daughter, an obsessive reader who plows through four or five books a week, disappointed that her novelist mom hasn’t invented a tweenage dystopia like the ones she devours daily. For her, like for so many readers her age, reading means plunging into the supernatural, fantasy, science fiction, some wild imagined world where new rules apply. I watched endless alternate universes with daring heroines pile up on my daughter’s nightstand, baffled by how different her tastes were from mine at her age—until I finally understood one very obvious answer to her question. My daughter’s fascination with nonrealistic literature began a few years ago with one of my own childhood favorites: Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, first published in 1962. And that was where the wrinkle between my daughter’s time and mine began.
A Wrinkle in Time is about a girl who traverses five dimensions to rescue her physicist father, who’s being held hostage in another solar system by (wait for it) an evil intergalactic brain. En route, she crosses a two-dimensional world, stops in an Elysian field filled with centaur-pegasi, and recuperates on a planet populated by blind healing beasts. In the sequel, A Wind in the Door, she saves her little brother from terminal illness by traveling into his cells, likely making this to be the world’s only novel set primarily inside a mitochondrion. It’s awesome, if you’re ten years old and into that kind of thing.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
