Sorry, didn't clarify--that was two different things I was talking about, mutant/genetic evolution/gene manipulation-ish books--not too picky on the specifics, just that sort of thing (one) and Starship Troopers (two).
Actually, I don't know why I couldn't include comic books, since I'm defining the material and the audience for the fictional course I'm creating, and X-Men is really what I had in mind, but how accessible are copies of comic books and graphic novels in libraries?
One part of my rewriting of the syllabus is to expand the SF part of the course, which is all of one week right now, so I'm going for both breadth and depth--history of science fiction for children, and well-written SF for children. I'm much stronger on fantasy than I am on SF, because that just interests me more, especially high fantasy.
I've got books like A Wrinkle in Time, The Giver, Among the Hidden (Margaret Petersen Haddix), The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm (Nancy Farmer), Ender's Game, Dune, and Feed, for starters. (Feed just came out last year, by M.T. Anderson--good book, but it's yet another dystopic view of the future, which seems to be the trend in serious SF for children for the last 10 or 15 years.) I have several stacks of other books I've pulled off library shelves randomly that I'll be trying to skim-read this week (Starship Troopers is one of those).
Anyway, thanks for the suggestions. More are welcome if you have them--but I can't use suggestions for movies. That's my problem--I can think of plenty of movie examples, but this is a literature course, so I have to stick to books, or at least to print.
Oh, and if any of you might be familiar with high fantasy books (for children YA and younger) that are based on something other than the regular British tradition, I'd appreciate those suggestions, too. (An example is Little Sister, by Kara Dalkey, which uses Japanese mythology, culture, and ideas of rank, a nice difference from the regular Western feudal stuff you usually see in children's lit, at least.)