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CronoDAS comments on On Juvenile Fiction - Less Wrong
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Hmmm...
I've read a lot, so it's hard to say specifically what fiction had a lasting impact. I will point to Ultima IV, though; I played through the NES version with the help of Nintendo Power magazine. It's a very unusual game compared to the standard RPG plot. Instead of there being some world-threatening crisis with some BigBad to defeat, the game's goal is to become a moral person and serve as an example for others to follow.
I learned about work from Dilbert, which, as everyone knows, is not a satire, but a documentary.
The first two, and only the first two, books of Terry Goodkind's "Sword of Truth" series have some useful lessons that I took to heart. Unfortunately, Goodkind followed them up with a big pile of toxic waste, eventually turning the series's moral basis completely on its head, with the hero coming to embody everything he was warned against becoming.
I'd also recommend Terry Pratchett's Discworld series to everyone under the sun. (Start with Mort.)
Goodkind is NOT for kids, unless you want them to have nightmares about Mord-Sith until three years after puberty.
Terry Pratchett works, though. I can't really see a kid ever getting religion after that.
I would agree in principle -- Pratchett's work is a remarkably good illustration of what the world would look like if supernaturalist thinking made a scrap of sense -- except that the most enthusiastic Pratchett fan I ever met was (unfortunately for me) also a devout theist.
I think I have ceased to be surprised at the ability of intelligent people to compartmentalize.
My parents also read Pratchett. My little brother did too. You'd just have to get the Pratchett books before you got religion, and then, I think, it would act as a pretty powerful vaccine. At least it seems like it ought to...
Agreed on Goodkind not being for kids.
Anyone else here read the "His Dark Materials" series by Philip Pullman?
I found that pretty relentlessly downbeat. It attacks organized religion but gives a free pass to supernaturalism. I didn't approve.
While it does invoke certain supernatural elements I would disagree that this makes them less rational. Angels exist, but are fallible, mortal and material creatures composed of Dust. Dust itself is a fundamental particle with known and predictable behaviors, though admittedly ones that are somewhat implausible. The biggest leap is the world of the dead in the final book, but I found it a very good description of how awful an afterlife would actually be, and the problems with an all powerful god figure.
In terms of rationalist virtues, the children succeed by being self reliant and intelligent, and it avoids the heavy handed morality of most YA fiction (for example the main character is a skilled liar, and thats seen as a good thing when used well).
It kind of goes in the opposite direction, to the point where I find it jarring. "The boy is a murderer." "Oh, that means I should trust him." Buh?
Not until adulthood, sadly.
It's a shame, because I liked the Narnia books (and was proud of myself for picking up on the Christian symbolism without prompting, before I knew anything else about C.S. Lewis); I could have really used Pullman.
Goodkind is indeed not for kids. I'd say that the series is worthwhile through book 4 or even 5 (though book 3 is a lowpoint), though not for the weak-stomached. It picks up again around book 9 or 10, but the few thousand pages between them is mostly not worth it.