Science fiction you might enjoy reading includes the following short stories:

• Anything by , especially [1935].
• The short stories of — who had a wonderful imagination but who died young — especially [1934], which was voted the most popular SF story of all time by the Science Fiction Writers of America.

  Another of his stories, [1935], begins as follows:

  "Idiots!" howled Grant Calthorpe. "Fools — nitwits — imbeciles!" He sought wildly for some more expressive terms, failed and vented his exasperation in a vicious kick at the pile of rubbish on the ground.

  Too vicious a kick, in fact; he had again forgotten the one-third normal gravitation of Io, and his whole body followed his kick in a long, twelve-foot arc.

  As he struck the ground the four loonies giggled. Their great, idiotic heads, looking like nothing so much as the comic faces painted on Sunday balloons for children, swayed in unison on their five-foot necks, as thin as Grant's wrist.

  "Get out!" he blazed, scrambling erect. "Beat it, skiddoo, scram! No chocolate. No candy. Not until you learn that I want ferva leaves, and not any junk you happen to grab. Clear out!"

  The loonies — Lunae Jovis Magnicapites, or literally, Bigheads of Jupiter's Moon — backed away, giggling plaintively. Beyond doubt, they considered Grant fully as idiotic as he considered them, and were quite unable to understand the reasons for his anger. But they certainly realized that no candy was to be forthcoming, and their giggles took on a note of keen disappointment.

  So keen, indeed, that the leader, after twisting his ridiculous blue face in an imbecilic grin at Grant, voiced a last wild giggle and dashed his head against a glittering stone-bark tree. His companions casually picked up his body and moved off, with his head dragging behind them on its neck like a prisoner's ball on a chain.

  I found his "balloon heads" so funny that I included this image in my Introduction to Paul's third book when I said "Only valley girls, hari krishnoids and balloon heads from Uranus fail to see that, where science is concerned, what's true for you is also true for me."

• [1956], a short story by .
• The short short stories of , which are the cleverest brain farts you will ever find.

I also like an occasional novel:

• [1980], by .
• [1977], by .

As you can see, I prefer "hard" science fiction and have no interest in the "sword and sorcery" genre, even when set in outer space. The of novels by Asimov, for example, can hardly be considered sci-fi except for the trivial fact that it ostensibly takes place in the far future. Asimov freely admitted that it was simply a re-imagining of ancient Roman politics in an interplanetary context.

In addition to "food for thought" sci-fi, I also like a genre for children and the young-at-heart which you might call "threatened pets". Here are two books in this genre that I've especially enjoyed.

• [1954], by . A boy inherits his dad's extraterrestrial pet and soon finds that it is growing large and troublesome. The neighbors become outraged, and the city decides to have the animal destroyed. Coincidentally, astronomers soon discover a hitherto unknown race of extraterrestrials zooming towards the Earth in gigantic spaceships, threatening to destroy all life on Earth.
• The Enormous Egg [1956], by . In New England, a boy's chicken lays an enormous egg, out of which hatches a Triceratops. At first everything goes swimmingly — until some stupid congressmen in Washington decide that the animal is "un-American". Oliver later told me that the book was an attack on McCarthyism, but no children's book reviewer was smart enough ever to figure that out. A subsequent book, The Trouble with Jenny's Ear [1960] was more overt in his rejection of witch-hunting. Jenny's ear is so sensitive that she hears everything around her. But instead of this power causing friction between her and other people, it empowers her to be a better and more constructive person. Oliver would have loved the internet.

Needless to say, adults that threaten their children's pets always lose.