1) Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
2) On The Origins of Species by Charles Darwin
3) 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C Clarke (watch the movie after reading the book)
4) The Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov
5) Pandora's Star by Peter F Hamilton

I agree with that. That rule applies to all of Sci-Fi.

Start with the new movie, chances are they will like that more than TOS or even TNG. Next I suggest a couple episodes of TNG. I strongly suggest showing Encounter at Farpoint and Chain of Command. But it really is your choice.

Why is the threshold for a different species different for microbes?

...Ender's game when Ender first enters zero gravity and he starts laughing because of the distortion of senses that occurs because there is no up or down!

Any Windows laptop will be a major step up from any Macbook.

The Zune was introduced to the market after EVERYONE had an iPod. Once people use apple products, they are too stupid to even consider using better products, which is why sales of Zune hardware have more or less failed. Zune also comes out with way better earphones that last more than 10 minutes.

I mean where phones only use GSM and are not only specific to one provider.

Nokia and the Symbian OS has always sold well outside the United States, because everywhere but the United States GSM is the standard, and that is Nokia's specialty. Nokia still sells relatively well outside the US, but it still losing to the Android (BIG TIME). I like my Nokia E71x, but I want an Android, however, I'm on the ATT network and switching is more of a hassle, unless GSM becomes the standard. I have messed around with both an Android and a Windows Phone 7, I give the upper hand to the Android platform, although Windows Phone 7 is great in its own right, I would buy a Nokia Windows Phone 7 phone, because of my brand loyalty (to Nokia and Windows).