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james_davis_nicollTen 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.]
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.]
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Date: 2007-04-20 12:37 am (UTC)But I always alternated my genres; I was reading bizarre YA (I'm not sure where else the Bagthorpe series would fit in, except possibly "humour"), adult fantasy (Peter S. Beagle), "adult" SF (Anne McCaffrey, shelved in the YA section, and I honestly thought it was fantasy until the [spoiler tech] showed up in the third book), and trash (the Xanth series) at roughly the same time.