An idle thought inspired by the bloodsports over at SFWA

[james_davis_nicoll]

Ten quatloos on Nick Mamatas!

Wait, no. That's not it.

I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to say that there doesn't seem to be much in the way of the young adult material that hooked people like me on SF back in the 1970s (and of course, part of the 1970s being the very best decade for getting hooked on SF was that material from as far back as the 1950s was still on library shelves). Yes, there's Tor's Starscape and TOr Teen but that's one publisher, albeit a big one. Could the general lack of young adult material be linked to the, hrm, grognardism seen over at SFWA?

I don't mean cause and effect but symptoms of the same process.

I seem to recall that one of the ideas behind Dozois' Escape from Earth: New Adventures in Space was that it might be interesting to create fun material aimed at young adults that wasn't condescending (Now, three of the stories used poverty to drive the plot and two of them used slavery but that just raises the stakes for the protagonists. People still remember Citizen of the Galaxy fondly and Thorby starts off a poor slave). I like the idea behind the anthology but why in the 21st century should that premise be unusual enough to get mentioned in the introduction?


[Added later: For the purposes of this discussion, I would like to exclude fantasy. I freely admit that there are problematic edge cases in classification.]

Comments

[gjules.livejournal.com]

Counterexamples: Scott Westerfeld. Eoin Colfer (yes, marketed as fantasy, but at least as skiffy, IMO). Kenneth Oppel. All of 'em popular with actual YAs, and all of them writers who rose to popularity post-2000.

YA science fiction is much less prevalent than YA fantasy, but it's still present. And YA fantasy is a HUGE share of the YA market. I think the real problem is that people reading YA science fiction aren't being drawn into the adult SF market, because once you leap that barrier all the new stuff coming out is dense. And assumes you've got a solid grounding in the genre's history, which 20-somethings tend not to. It's a hell of a lot easier to jump from YA fantasy into adult fantasy than from YA SF to adult SF.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

For the purposes of this discussion, I would like to exclude fantasy. I freely admit that there are problematic edge cases in classification.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

"We need SF for the kids!" seems to be everyone's secret recipe, but SF seems very unusual in that if you're not reading it by age 15 the chances of you ever reading it with any regularity as an adult is very low.

Seems to me that we may want to try writing SF for adults not already steeped in the genre. Works for, oh I dunno, mystery.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

You know, in all the years I hung out on rec.arts.mystery before giving up on it, I can't recall anyone ever talking about what got them hooked on mystery [1].

Mysteries do some things a lot better than SF novels do in my opinion. For one thing, I know when I pick up a Harry Bosch novel, while there may be issues that continue from book to book, there will be a complete story in the volume I am holding. With series SF, there's no guarantee of that at all.

Granted, fantasy is as bad or worse in this regard but you know, genre fantasy's market share is really only good in comparison to SF's.


1: In my case, probably Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen.

[montoya.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that nobody actually reads YA stuff. I mean, when I think back to my days in the school library, the only actual YA things I read were a few Sylvia Engdahl books and Lloyd Alexander. Beyond that, it was all Asimov and Tolkien and Piers Anthony (who isn't intentionally YA, anyway) and McCaffrey and, um, Star Trek...

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

With all due respect, did you just go from "I didn't do this" to "therefore nobody does it"?

[chuk-g.livejournal.com]

As a library worker, I can tell you that the YA stuff sure flies off the shelves. I don't actually see them reading the books, but I think it's a reasonable assumption that that's why they're being signed out. Most of our actual book content is probably non-SF, but the SF (and especially fantasy :-( ) books seem to circulate disproportionately.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

I read YA. Admittedly, I started adult SF when I was about six, so missed a lot of the older stuff, but I read it now because I like it.

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

In my experience, there just aren't many YA SF novels. I get a fair number of YA fantasy novels for review, but YA SF is pretty thin on the ground (or I'm not getting it, which is also entirely possible). There are titles that I get that I'd be comfortable giving to a teenage reader (I didn't read much YA SF as a teenager, I got my start reading SF with Charles Ingrid's Sand Wars series and Joan D. Vinge's Catspaw--and then Heinlein), but even those a few and far between. A lot of the SF I get these days is, as gjules points out, is dense. Exceptions that I can think of off the top of my head: Sandra McDonald's The Outback Stars and Scalzi's books. Bujold's Vorkosigan books. Ender's Game. Landon's The Hidden Worlds also looks promising from a new-to-SF reader perspective as well.

There's a good reason I tend to include more fantasy than SF in RT--fantasy is much more accessible to readers who aren't already steeped in SF. I try to include a decent amount of SF each month, but it's incredibly difficult when a lot of the big names in the field are writing really dense, complicated books that, frankly, are probably a bit more book than your average romance reader wants to read. While romance novels can be challenging (there's a big controversy right now over Anna Campbell's Claiming the Courtesan and the role of rape/forced seduction in romance fiction--see here for a review/discussion), they're challenging in a different way than SF books are. (Pet peeve: people dismissing romance readers as being stupid. No, they're not.)

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Do I need to turn on javascript to read the comments?

[amberdine.livejournal.com]

What was in those YA racks in the late 70s? Trying to remember...

LeGuin, McCaffrey, Piers Anthony, Douglas Adams. Of those, I guess only Adams was SF, and really he was more comedy/mainstream than genre. One of the reasons I skipped up to the "adult" section of the library ASAP was because those were properly marked with blue spaceship stickers on the spine. :)

I was hooked on SF earlier than YA, though, in the children's section, by writers like Madeline L'Engle and C.S. Lewis.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

LeGuin, McCaffrey, Piers Anthony, Douglas Adams. Of those, I guess only Adams was SF, and really he was more comedy/mainstream than genre.

Pern first appeared in Analog, you know. Also, a lot of early Anthony is (not very hard) SF. A Spell for Chameleon wasn't until 1977.

There was Norton, of course. An Ace book I have kicking around had a full page of Heinlein YAs facing a full page ad for the Nortons. The Heinlein has maybe a dozen titles. The Norton has fifty.

John Christopher, of course. Suzanne Martel. I think Andy Offutt did at least one YA, which made the next book of his that I saw (which featured casual rape and semi-naked barbarians) something of a change of pace. Panshin got reprinted in the 1970s. Hugh Walters. H. Beam Piper. That guy whose name I can't remember except it starts with an L who wrote about things like galactic olympics. Alan E. Nourse. Ray Bradbury. Robert Silverberg, before his depulpification.

LeGuin's young adult SF

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Waterloo Public Library put The Left Hand of Darkness down in the kids section, as I recall. Dispossessed was upstairs with the rest of the adult fiction.

[piehead.livejournal.com]

I would echo a sentiment already expressed here, which is that I got into SF mostly by reading "for-adults" stuff that my Dad already had on the shelves. Asimov, Heinlein, Dangerous Visions, etc. The Hobbit.

When I go back and reread some of that stuff now, as something resembling a grown-up, I'm struck by how much less complex most of it was than reading, say, "Moby Dick" or "Lord Jim".

(I was also struck by the sheer volume of misogyny, but hey, that's another topic.)

I did read A Wrinkle in Time and probably some other more kid-targeted stuff that I'm forgetting, but for the most part it was "real stuff".

And I think the draw of it all was the fact that it wasn't "child literature"; I burnt out on the elementary school library pretty quick.


My parents were pretty hands-off about controlling what I read. I guess they figured if I wanted to try to read it, good for me. I'd imagine I'll be the same way when I get around to having kids. It kind of boggles my mind when other parents, say, don't let their young kids read to far into the Harry Potter books because of the increasingly dark tone.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I would echo a sentiment already expressed here, which is that I got into SF mostly by reading "for-adults" stuff

I'm another data point on the getting into SF at the age of ten-to-twelve with for-adults stuff, and such anecdotal evidence as I have suggests that this is pretty common at least among SF readers in their 30s and 40s.

[winterknight.livejournal.com]

That would be the same for me. My parents had no restrictions on what I read. I was done with Madeline L'Engle by the time I was about 11. I was on to the worlds of Corwin of Amber and Thomas Covenant by then, both given to me by my dad, as well as Heinlein and Asimov. I also read John Updike and Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Ernest Hemingway and... well, anything I could get my hands on.

I don't really understand the restrictions either. I certainly don't have any for my child's reading preferences, though I wish she'd quit reading girlie books like the "Mates and Dates" series. Ew. I tell myself that at least she's reading. :p

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

A funny thing about elementary school libraries: The first elementary school I went to had a library whose books were segregated by grade level, and we were initially told we had to borrow out of the appropriate shelves. I mostly insisted on doing this even after my parents explicitly told me they had gotten a variance for me to read the more advanced books, because I was a big rule-follower and it seemed to me that those were the rules.

After a couple of years, I went to another school whose library wasn't organized this way, and that was when I started reading a lot of SF (and more advanced nonfiction as well).

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I had to go look up grognardism. I think I'm still fuzzy on the word itself, but I also think I know what it's doing in this conversation, so no worries.

I'm older than most of you guys, so in my kid days, YA was a term you only encountered in children's libraries. It was one of those rotating shelves and it was almost all Heinlein, some Asimov, a little Norton, Nourse and I forget who all else. I don't remember the YA section having non-SF in it, though I read lots of different kinds of things from all parts of the library.

I don't much get this conversation, anyway. When I was a kid, I was expected to read Dickens, Hugo, Mark Twain, Shakespeare, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Sabatini, Dymas, etc: none of those were written for kids. (I think the reason kids are expected to read less of those than in my day is that there are so many many more books altogether, not because we're losing connection to our literary past) Many of these books had copies in both the children's and the adult's sections.


I've said before that I think that sfnal ideas and conventions and tropes have been subsumed to some degree into other genres, and that means that people who want to read about certain kinds of what-ifs don't need to go to labelled shelves in the library or bookstore. So a lot of them don't.

But I think it also means that a lot of sf writers don't feel a burning need to fill the spot for rollicking yarn with a bit of sfnal in it, because they know it's being filled by thriller writers, romance writers, and so on. The need they feel is something else. So they write that something else.

I don't know whether that means that a lot of readers who would be reading rollicking yarn etc. from sf shelves are not looking at sf shelves for it and not finding it and wandering off to find it on the thriller shelves or romance shelves. It sounds like maybe it does mean that, or anyway like it means that sf people think it might and they're worried about the implications that may have.

As for me, I just read what I bump into that seems like I might like it, and I write what I personally want to read, because I don't know any better.

Mainstream thrillers with SFnal bits in

[almeda.livejournal.com]

Oh, lord, are those prevalent. And cracking yarns, in the 'pull you along with the story' sense, though often their science is utterly laughable*. Books with gene-gineered viruses, transgenic humans, time machines, super-weapons, near-godly AI, and even spaceships are being sold and marketed as mainstream thrillers, because oooh ow if you called it SF people (*cough* Margaret Atwood *cough*) might think it was crap.

* One example, which I shall name-and-shame if people are interested, has people getting a genome-typeable dna sample off a piece of CUT HAIR.

[ljgeoff.livejournal.com]

yeah, I'll add my voice to the growing chorus - my first SF was Bradbury, followed by Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein. I fell into the Pern books, and Amber, and Darkover. That was all in my teens, I'm pretty sure; the Bradbury and Asimov was pre-teen. When I was 16, my boyfriend gave me _Watership Down_ and the LoTR trilogy (for which, you know, I must always love him).

[luned.livejournal.com]

As I posted in a comment above, I got into SF by reading SF for children (ages 5-10, I assume, not YA.) I skipped from SF for kids directly into adult novels. This would be in the late 1980s. I was still reading non-genre novels for kids and then for adults but I really, really didn't like any of what was coming out specifically as YA in those days outside of some romance novels. Too depressing, too preachy, I don't know, but whatever it was it didn't appeal to me at all.

[xinef.livejournal.com]

There is a set of books with short stories, "Tales from the Wonder Zone", which are YA SF, edited by Julie E. Czerneda. http://ca.geocities.com/wonderzone@rogers.com/

Authors include James Alan Gardner (which is how we found out about the series), James Van Pelt and others. Intros by Gregory Benford, C.J. Cherryh and David Brin.

[xinef.livejournal.com]

p.s. My own story. Started reading L'Engle around grade 6, found some Lester Del Rey in my Jr HS library in the early 70s. Also remember reading John Christopher around that time. By the time I was in HS, was into Asimov, Clarke, and Silverberg, and then Heinlein by late HS. At university, discovered many more - McCaffrey, Andre Norton, Marion Zimmer Bradley to name but a few.

[orzelc.livejournal.com]

My feeling has long been that there is YA SF out there, but not in the places that adult SF fans are going to look. I think that a lot of the entry-point function of older YA novels is currently being filled by media tie-in stuff, which has gotten a whole lot more common at the same time that the "juvenile" novels have gone away.

But then, I'm not all that nostalgic for the older run of YA books, so it's possible that I'm just equating them with media tie-ins because I find both to have about the same literary merit.

[affreca.livejournal.com]

YA SF was not what got me to reading SF, as to much on my libraries shelves was not well written and mixed in with other YA stuff. I've read some good stuff, but by age 10 I was pulling most off my reading material from the adult SF section. Dad read did me "Star Man's Son", and after that I was off grabbing everything off their shelves - Bradley, Niven, Vinge, McCaffrey, Silverburg and so forth.

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

I see a lot of comments saying "it wasn't what got ME into reading SF," and I just wanted to say (as a youth librarian with a YA focus): well, me neither, but how old are we? There has been a HUGE explosion of YA publishing in the past decade. The current YAs are much better than the YAs of the 70s and 80s, on the whole, and there's a lot more of them, and they are getting read. Jeanne DuPrau, M.T. Anderson, Pete Hautman, Meg Rosoff, Scott Westerfeld, John Marsden... I'd sooner read YA SF than adult SF, half the time, it seems.

But I do think that just as much as we need YA science fiction, we need accessible adult science fiction. Star Wars and Star Trek novels were one of my SF entry points. We don't have huge visible SF franchises to that same extent right now... ST is largely moribund and the new SW movies were so bad (and people who want to extend their obsessions can easily go to internet discussion forums and computer games). Seems like a lot of recent science fiction is heavy either on technical stuff and military tactics, or on Big Ideas, in a way that can be intimidating.

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

I think it's worth mentioning, too, for those who don't know, that a lot of "adult SF/fantasy read by teenagers"-- Douglas Adams and Anne McCaffrey, and Dragonlance and Tolkien-- are ending up repackaged for YAs and/or shelved with the YAs in libraries.

[ghostwes.livejournal.com]

There may not be a lot of YA science fiction literature out there, but I wonder if some of the YA science fiction television and movies might create some interest; it certainly did for me. Seeing Star Wars when I was seven, as well as seeing Star Trek on the telly, was what got me into seeking similar stuff to read.