No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons

I read A Clockwork Orange before I saw the film version (in college as a junior). As an English major and logophile, I found the novel compelling, unsettling and very well written. While walking back to my dorm after the film, I became so nauseous I nearly puked. There’s one particular scene that caused that reaction. I will never watch that movie again, and it’s very unlikely I’ll re-read the novel because, for me, it’s been poisoned by the images in that scene.

I disagree with your categorization of ACO as YA. It may, in your view, fit that list from the panelists but, because of the unrelenting violence of Alex and co. as well as the state, the novel overall is an intensely depressing read. The boundaries between YA and adult fiction have indeed become blurry, but they haven’t disappeared. In the YA I’ve read, one can cheer for the kids; ACO elicits no such reaction.

Just my two cents. Hi, btw. 😉

Though I agree with the empirical claim of this post (YA is defined by simpler language and is less cognitively challenging), I’m not so sure that I see this as a ‘problem.’ Though I’m as sensitive to the appeal of literature as the next person (did a PhD in it back in the day, and am a scribbler manqué), I wonder nowadays if the value we assign to literature is just a case of pre-reflective capture by an artefact that happens to super-stimulate our cognitive systems. If it’s not that, it could be just as easily be a useful totem that allows us to signal affiliation to the clique that we believe we belong to (i.e. the thuper-duper clever people who really know the score).

Sure, it can be argued that literature that does something that other representational forms don’t. For instance, there’s Bal and Veltkamp (2013)’s and Kidd and Castano (2013)’s results on literature improving empathy. However, longer improvements of empathy have been shown to emerge from the deciedly more déclassé activity of identifying with a superhero.l Equally, in some soon-to-be unpublished work by my own group, we find that propensity to be captured by literature scales with anxiety, depression and absence of meaning.

What point am I making? I guess it’s that literature––understood as a proxy for ‘quality’ or ‘sophisticated’ writing––may well be like one of those parasites that convince their hosts that they want to be parasited on.

So I recently picked up a novel by one certain Jane Austen. I didn’t even know the genre, let alone the date of first publication. I had just come across the title “Pride and Prejudice” one time too many to just move along, so I wondered what all the fuss was about. And my mind was blown. I am no native English speaker, yet I was able to follow along with the amazing and complex prose because the intended meaning was always clear from context. I have never so much enjoyed characters ripping into each other with such gleeful rudeness before. Not least because I am a scarred child where major plot points revolving around characters refusing to communicate properly are concerned. (Harry Potter, I am farting in your general direction.) No such blame can be laid at Austen’s feet.

Anyway, my points are the following: The ease with which I can look up unfamiliar words on my ebook reader has so far prevented me from ever dropping a book because I couldn’t follow the prose. I learned English as my second language using Harry Potter, mostly because I had gobbled up the first two books and the third hadn’t been translated yet, so thirteen-year old overconfident ADHD-me went off on the deep end and bought the English version. I ended up nicking an OALD from the school library and via Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett I soon graduated to classic SciFi. Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, I even read Lem in English because I didn’t know any better. I don’t know if my own experiences are in any way representative of the young adult experience but I think the point is this: There is nothing inherently wrong with dumbed-down prose to reach a YA target audience. Most of them just do not know how to read with enjoyment yet. Most have actually been negatively biased by having to read weird stuff like “Catcher in the Rye” or “Moby Dick” in school. (Both are undoubtedly good books but you have to be able to _chose_ to read them.) I don’t think Harry Potter, Hunger Games etc are doing a disservice to readership as a whole by being simple prose yet thoroughly engaging. (Let’s leave Twilight out of it, shall we?)

My second point is that the classics are not going to go away. I may be weird in the way I make a point to _not_ look at a publication date before deciding to read something but I have the feeling that most books get bought via recommendations instead of bestseller lists.

And last but not least, I don’t imagine Peter (is able) to dump down his prose any time soon.

PS: And I just moved Edgar Allan Poe into my to-read list to find out what all the fuss is about. Cheers 🙂

I wouldn’t give in to despair just yet. If you look in other industries where the primary draw is some degree of escapism, the nature of the beast looks to be cyclical. For two decades, competitive pressure commanded Triple A developers of video games to further and further lower the challenge and skill level of their titles while compensating with flashier visuals and a proliferation of increasingly meaningless player choices to max out the hardware and pad out review paragraphs. Then Dark Souls hit the scene within the last few years like a excruciatingly overweight mace to the back of the head, and demonstrated that the murmurings of discontent on the internet had grown with time into a sizable market of status-seekers whose greatest desire was to segregate themselves from the plebeians, and blundered into skill and elevation of such while pursuing this desire as a byproduct.

Frankly, the idea that your diversionary material should be an exercise in self-improvement isn’t a new one. We’ve heard that bitter tsking constantly from the ivory towers of Literature. Of course, when they did it, it was an appeal to the Dark Ages of Obscurantism and abstruse High Culture, yes? We exclusively were the ones that had a monopoly on practical Aesops, the human condition, and relevant critical thinking. What did Sinclair Lewis say? “It can’t happen here”?

From my perspective, the Young Adult phenomenon is the latest incarnation of the struggle between emotion and information, where the purest evocation of emotion might be a surprise birthday party, and the purest expression of information might be a textbook chapter on the Deutsch Limit written entirely in Ithkuil. The long, twilight struggle between first the epic and the novel, and then between genre fiction and literary fiction, points to the conclusion that when forced to choose between what in which their amygdala finds merit and what in which the intelligentsia does, the one that releases the dopamine pulls ahead almost every time.

Here’s a decent takeaway: information density is an asset when it pulls on the subconscious as much as it does awareness. Life Of Pi might have been a literary smash hit that renewed Maclean’s hope that the hoi polloi were finally “getting it”, but I’d bet my bottom rupee that it owes most of its popular success to poking the populace’s ‘spirituality’ and ‘sublimity’ buttons. Likewise, while Blindsight taught me Icarus-loads about undistinguished yet brilliant science (science so brilliant that it would shock me if it didn’t play a major role in the upcoming century), that information most likely sticks in my hippocampus because it was synthesized into a cognitive prototype that was existentially terrifying.

A final digression:
I also recall breezing through works like The Lord Of The Rings in the summer break between the second and third grade, but then, upon returning to those novels in my teenage years, they were noticeably denser and sometimes even a slog. I blame it on “Semiotic Baggage”: as humans age, their brains come to associate denotations more solidly with an increasing morass of connotations, until the prefrontal cortex spends so much of its energy recognizing connections and unpacking (optional) information that it restricts itself to the digestible just to get some relief. Reading a work of fantasy, science fiction, or horror basically becomes an act of cognitive dissonance.

Perhaps the best means of circumventing it might be to drop the concept of Readability Levels entirely, and encourage young children to expand their reading material up to the college level early on, when the nerves are still plastic and semantics easily skimmed, before having them return for critical analysis at the close of Secondary Education.

//It may only be a matter of time before Nineteen Eighty Four is reissued using only words from the Eleventh edition of the Newspeak Dictionary.//

Actually, that could be great, from the point of view of being fully immersed into the world, ala Clockwork Orange.

Even better, create a different version of Newspeak (with new words so that people already familiar with blackwhite and duckspeak won’t be clued in too quickly), write a story from the point of view of a prole or Outer Party member just in Newspeak, and see if you can get the majority of your readers to fail to notice that something horrible is going on, obscured by the language.

You’re gonna love Randall Munroe’s Thing Explainer then

“The titles, labels, and descriptions are all written using only the thousand most common English words. Since this book explains things, I’ve called it Thing Explainer.”

I distinctly remember my nerdy friends and I reading The Clockwork Orange when we were 16-17 years old. Does this classify as Young Adult? I guess it does. I think it made a much larger impression on me than it would’ve done if I read it a couple of years later. Also, interestingly enough, the part of the book that we liked the most were the very extensive translator notes about challenges of coming up with faux-Russian swearwords.

I turned out fucked up like hell, but I doubt it was the book’s fault.

Anyway, I think you could push anything, apart from straight-up porn, as a YA novel as long as it’s got an adolescent main character. Make Ciri Keeton et al. into a bunch of teenagers et voila, “a heady read for a new generation”. Tons of Sarasti fan-art on DeviantArt, homoerotic fanfics, you name it.

Oh Nigel, stop bloody sulking – you’re all over the place.

“As a writer for children…”? Right. So that’s *not* YA, is it. That’s Children’s Fiction. Now how about we all grow the fuck up and start calling things what they really are.

The truly pernicious factor in YA is that it exists as a category at all. It’s a label designed to patronise and to coddle – “Oh hey, we’re not saying you’re a *child*. No, no, you’re such grown up big boy you’re a *Young Adult*. And we made all these books *especially for you*. So you won’t have to strain your little head.” In short, it’s the creeping infantilisation of late stage capitalism, writ large across the publishing industry’s forehead in dayglo marker.

The books themselves – *shrug* – almost irrelevant to the argument. They’ll be good, bad or indifferent, just like books in general. Some will carefully toe the recommended-content line in hopes of securing the market, some will end up dumped into the YA bin because they happen, coincidentally, to tick the right boxes. But none of this will change the fact that there are books for children, which are written in a curated fashion to cater to the children they are intended for, and there are books for adults which are not. There is no third category, and we do our children a grave disservice in trying to pretend there is.

Hi, Richard. I think we once had a nice e-mail interview when your Black Widow series came out. Big fan. You’re talking absolute bollocks.

Well, I suppose I was all over the place with my response – sorry about that, but Jesus, grown-up men and women don’t half talk shite when it comes to children’s books. By the way, I describe myself as a children’s writer because my work has mostly been for mid-grade (that’s roughly 8-12, a distinction rightly meaningless to anyone until they do a primary school visit and stand before various classes of different ages and have to choose which stories and excerpts to read and hold their attention – then it suddenly matters a lot) but I has aspirations to write for both older and younger. Almost as if different age groups within the rather large section of the populace covered by Children’s Books require different approaches.

I do acknowledge that the big thing about people opining on YA as a category, particularly in response to a blog-post that argues, based on almost no reading in the area at all, that it is in the process of dumbing-down the reading public, is that the books themselves are almost irrelevant. People outraged at the existence of YA as a category don’t seem to particularly give a shit about the books contained therein. They haven’t read them but they’re pretty damn sure they’re infantilising and dumbing down and working the sophistication ratchet backwards. Children whose reading faculties spring fully formed from the brow of Zeus need no guidance and gradations when it comes to books, and let the rest founder as they may.

My own feeling is that the fact that it exists as a marketing category is irrelevant. Seriously who gives a fuck? (Except that I worked as a bookseller long enough to know I laugh in face of anyone who thinks that categories and sub-categories of books should be done away with.) What is relevant, to me, anyway, is the books, the reading, and the kids getting the books and doing the reading. The category of children includes infants. The process of growing to adulthood is moving away from infanthood. The process of becoming a reader and developing as a reader is the same. People develop at different rates, have different tastes which, in this day and age, can be explored freely and widely by teens in the category of YA. YA isn’t a marketing niche, it’s a microcosm. From one point of view it’s a microcosm of all the marketing niches that, if they infantilise children, surely infantilise adults, though I think to suggest as much is a grotesque insult to both. From a more useful point of view it is a microcosm of most of the reading opportunities available. And it is not fixed. It is fluid and there is overlap, which seems to cause no end of trouble for people who think that if categories exist they must be rigidly defined and enforced.

My point is, that if calling a category YA is infantiising, then so is the division or sub-division of any process of growth or maturing or education, which seems counter-intuitive to me.

So, disservice? No, they are a service. To adults who care for children and, as they grow, to children themselves. I mean I get that I’m suppose to care more about evil marketing and capitalism, but I just don’t. Kids have more and wider reading material available to them than when I was growing up, and the space to find and explore them, and that is flipping awesome. (I think you’d write a terrific YA book, too. Jesus, an SF YA written with your style and sensibilities? The shelves would explode.)

Joe Abercrombie’s YA books (not sure they were marketed YA in the US but they were over here) are great, and an example of what a writer can do without sacrificing any of their own distinctive sensibilities. He seems to get YA as a category, too.

Many superhero comics are YA – Ms Marvel won a Hugo! YA is FULL of stuff for kids to obsess over. I also suspect that YA dystopias will be with us for a while, albeit in different forms. It’s just the zeitgeist of growing up in a surveillance state besieged by terrorism, plagued by economic collapse and on the brink of ecological catastrophe.

ps – that comment about the infantilisation process of late stage capitalism is not meant to carry ponderous good vs evil moral tones – it’s a simple statement of fact. Late stage capitalism, having satisfied more basic needs, is driven inevitably to seek to satisfy increasingly non-essential desires. Over time that means discouraging effort or exertion in consumers in favour of handing them easy options and escalating levels of comfort. It applies as much to food – ready meals and snacks vs actual cooking – as it does to prose fiction.

As for YA and superhero comics – fucking tell me about it 🙂 I was flabbergasted when I wrote for Marvel and found myself fenced about with a thicket of “thou shalt nots”, and worse still a readership contaminated with Stepford Readers who concurred fully with those limits. Most fucking stupid thing I’ve ever been faced with in my career as a writer – if that’s writing YA, then no thank you very much.

Thank you, Peter – heh, I wondered if I’d set myself up there.

No, I don’t think you were defending Dan Brown (he did make my inner child cry) but when the vogue for new covers on Rowling’s books occurred there was a lot of pushback and sneering, deserved to some extent, because it was a bit silly, but at the same time the bestselling adult books were by Brown and I’d rather read a hundred Rowlings than a single Brown, and I was never embarrassed by the cover. I guess my point was, judging children’s fiction by Rowling is like judging adult fiction by Brown. Which, if you did, children’s fiction would come off better.

So with that kind of leakage, what the hell is the point of even having a YA category?

It’s purely practical. Children’s books is huge. Overstuffed and overcrowded with titles at every level. They’re divided up into sub-categories purely out of self-defense and stock-management and guidance and teacher’s headaches and parent’s bewilderment. Possibly the kids find it useful, too. The marketing stuff is a by-product, though possibly an overwhelming one at times. And of course as the Young pushes into Adult, the lines blur, and there’s leakage, but it’s not really a problem, if anything it’s an advantage.

I take grave, grave issue with that checklist as a working definition of YA.

I can’t really account for cyncism and efforts to dumb down work. It’s not necessary. Kids aren’t dumb. They’re just growing. People should remember that.

Yes! An accord!

When people talk about writing aimed at kids, this is what they mean, or should mean. You do not write as if the kids are dumb. You write as if the kids are growing.

Anybody hear tell of this new marketing category, “New Adult”?

Um. That is not my circus. Those are not my monkeys.

Why does that change once we cross the threshold of 13 years old

(Sorry if I’m starting to fill up the comments section haphazardly.)

It doesn’t, really, it’s still children’s fiction – YA is just a sub-category of that. If it wasn’t YA written over the shelves, it’d be 13-18. In libraries it’s often both. I’ve even heard professionals – agents, editors, booksellers – divide them further into Younger and Older Teens, though I haven’t seen it on the shelves. YA is a purely practical thing – in my mind and in the minds of most of the people I know. Yes, marketers take tedious advantage of it, but what isn’t tedious about marketing taking advantage of things?

A useful phrase for these categories is that they are arbitrary – in that of course no two 13-year-olds develop at the same speed – but not random, inasmuch as it is useful and necessary to have the cut-off point somewhere as a point of reference.

I agree with you about the young protagonist thing. Having them is great, but it shouldn’t be a requirement, and suggesting that young readers can’t identify with adults is tantamount to suggesting you can’t identify with anyone different from you which would be a disastrous approach to take to writing or reading. Some writers get around it by having the protagonists age over the course of a series. Rowling did it, but Philip Reeves had his leads age, marry have a child, grow old and die over the course of his Mortal Engines series. I mean, I don’t think the authors wrote them as a get-around but it rather proves how asinine a restriction it is.

To be fair I also don’t know whether it HAS become immovable fixed received wisdom, or if putting young protagonists in children’s books is just something modern authors naturally do. At this point, though, I suspect if you wanted an adult protagonists you’d need to be established and you’d have to push for it. How hard you’d have to push, I don’t know. It might suddenly seem quote innovative. I don’t think writers are banging down the doors for it, though. Margo Langan’s Tender Morsels and Brides Of Rollrock Island had adult protagonists.

Peter,

If you haven’t heard of it yet, try the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality fanfic. Puts an interesting twist on HP by making both the protagonist and the antagonist smart. The writing is sometimes (especially at the begining) a bit rough but I enjoyed it a lot. Good fun.

Our Gracious Host wrote: I have to wonder if YA does that, if it improves one’s reading skills or merely panders to them. I doubt that your vocabulary is any bigger when you finish Harry Potter and the Well-Deserved Bitch-Slap than when you started. You may have been entertained, but you were not upgraded.

Au Contraire, Dr Watts! When I and my friends read A Clockwork Orange at an average age of about 15 years, we thought it was incredibly awesome because it provided us with a new slang that was unlikely to be understood by anyone else in our shiny new suburbs. Not long after reading the book, we were all using Nadsat as much as possible and we found ways to intrude it into almost any conversation we were having, regardless with whom or regarding what. Interestingly, years later, at the peak of the Cold War, some adult kids of early defectors came within my peer group, and when they started talking amongst themselves in Russian, I was actually shocked to discover that I understood much of it.

Thus, A Clockwork Orange is not merely YA, but very educational YA. Yet, reading it from the age-group of the protagonist, it might be all too easy to fall into the mindset of the protagonist. It’s arguable as to whether Little Alex (and his droogs) are the products of their failed socialist utopia, or whether they’re simply the product of a developmental stage when nearly adult intelligence and adult drives are little moderated by scant adult conscience. In the end, Little Alex may “win”, but for how long? If he lives long enough, his dreams may provide his own internal “Ludovico” aversion therapy. The story doesn’t suggest this, and one might say that this definitively keeps this in the YA category. That might be one of the unspoken rules for the subgenre.

To the other thing: writing simply — yet thought-provokingly — for the YA-and-younger audiences, that’s hard. As adults writing for adults, we are all too easily drawn into seeking to display subtlety and stylistic flourish, and in many cases (as adult readers) we are willing to forgive a lack of clarity of story if presented with enough literary legerdemain. Yet some writers do manage to pull off the real trick, which is to tell a story at multiple levels, which makes sense on all of those levels. Early works by Ursula K LeGuin are good examples, especially the early Hainish Cycle titles such as Rocannon’s World. It seems like a lot of hobbitry but there’s a fair amount of science snuck in there.

Borderline-sitting in the fuzzy domains between fantasy and SF in the Fifties and Sixties, Zenna Henderson’s “People” cycle mixes the very straightforward and seemingly simple short stories with the fairly complex bridge pieces written to try to make a novel out of the reprinted shorts. Yet if we judge it by the rules-of-YA as laid out above, this cannot be YA because almost all of those short stories have a pretty clear vision of what is going on in the minds of tweens and young-adults (even super-powered ones!), but the recurrent theme set out is of teachers with special talents for reaching the nascent adult in the troubled teens portrayed, and the world is less corrupt than it is ignorant or superstitious. Yet as a teen I found these stories extremely readable, and reading them all again a few times throughout my adult life I have found them as readable, yet bringing new understanding on new levels. The prose is straightforward and so are the stories, yet for the first-time reader back in a simpler day when these ideas hadn’t been done to death in TV and film, the stories were full of surprise and wonder, and often full of a better way of looking at things. Does anyone even really try to do that anymore?

“I’m puzzled by the idea that “corrupt/dystopian society” should be a defining characteristic of YA.
AngusM

You need the ‘rebellious young folks fight an oppressive society’ trope if you really want to lucratively tap into the mindset of a resentful teenager who’s just been told to take the bins out. This is the key not so much to YA fiction, but to successful YA fiction, particularly the kind that spawns movie franchises, especially if said rebellious young folks are also ubermenschoid mutants the corrupt society, or some other buncha old people, want to kill just coz they’re different. And, y’know, better than everyone else, not that YOU care. Stay out of my room!

I blame John Wyndham. Which reference gives you an idea just how freakin’ old I am.

Love the exchanges going on in this comment section…

While I largely agree with Richard’s take on the direction modern culture is going, I’m not sure if calling it “late-stage capitalism” helps very much (as it brings a lot of baggage). But the general point seems correct. Nearly anywhere you go around the world, it seems cinema and books have changed over the past couple of generations, from tackling big “serious” issues, spirituality, poetry, Art (capital A), life and the soul, to largely being entertainment.

On the other hand, as the world has gotten richer, there’s a lot more literacy and people who have more time for cinema, books, etc., so I wonder how much of this is just a broadening of the cultural base.

Instead of record collections, people today can stream nearly any piece of music ever recorded, at any time. Classical music is much less followed today, but kids can tell you all about 20 different classifications of EDM. TV is incomparably richer and more varied (and more “grown up”) than what I grew up with in the 1970s and 80s. Tarkovsky and Kubrick have given way to Michael Bay … But Bong Joon Ho has been given $60 million to make a scifi film for Netflix.

(Only pro wrestling remains the same…)

Not sure if I really have a point, except I think for each thing we’ve lost, we’ve probably gained something else, and maybe we’re just too close to the changes to really see it. And the rise of adults reading YA is just a small piece of a much larger set of trends occurring across culture.

It appears I don’t have all the chest thumping out of my system yet, but I’ll try to put in perspective at the end. Someone above mentioned Poe, and I recall now that before I had even graduated (though some would quibble if this was really an upgrade, no doubt) to classic sci-fi in my early teens, I had read the collected works of Poe, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Aurthur Conan Doyle, HG Wells, Jules Verne, a reasonable amount of Dickens–goddamn Moby Dick–all by the time I was about 9 or 10. For leisure.

This strikes me as utterly remarkable now. That there was an age where I could just pick up a book, any book, and read it for leisure. I recall not struggling nearly so much with putting together antiquated dialect and dated language from context as I would now. This is something my child’s brain could do, that my adult one would struggle with.

This, however, is something I have to credit to the parental units. I read this stuff because it was what was around. My parents used to gift me handfuls of these paperbacks. They were all considered “young adult reading” . How crazy is that? How many of us could struggle through Moby Dick today for kicks, if not required to for school?

Now, perspective. I read them because we lived in a rural area, there were only three goddamn channels on the television, and they all sucked. I was lucky enough I guess, to be a product of my time and environment, and to develop a reading for leisure habit that I carried with me the rest of my life. I have no illusion that if I were born even ten years later, with the advent of basic cable and more sophisticated video games, that I would be the same. And the internet, that great swirling vortex of inanity that no free time can escape? Forget about it. I’d have been toast. That kids read at all today is remarkable to me.

Realizing that, I would not choose to let my niece detect any derision from me over any choice of reading material, even modern YA. No doubt I will have to look at the crushing disappointment in her eye when I gift to her some of the things I read when was young, in hilariously out of style dead tree volumes, and watch her wonder if I, in fact, hate her.

You are right, Peter. It is the same with pop music:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/science-proves-pop-music-has-actually-gotten-worse-8173368/

Also, Nellie was satire?? You should have published it on the 1st of April.
(Told you I am not the sharpest pencil, Adam.)

AngusM: I realize you need a good antagonist and nothing satisfies like overthrowing a tyrant. I realize that President Snow or whoever is just a surrogate for mom and dad who are being, like, _so_ unreasonable. Still, the idea that one increasingly hackneyed trope should be set up as a defining characteristic is almost as disturbing as the dumb-it-down-as-far-as-possible-and-then-some trend.

This may have much to do with “Individuation” as Jung would have it. I first encountered the term in the context of an infant realizing that it is independent of the mother and that other things in the universe are also individuated. This relates a bit, developmentally, to Theory of Mind, at that stage. Yet this whole “we are ourselves and we are not others” bit continues through development and in some ways it’s a bit more subtle and in other ways it’s not very subtle at all. Relevant to your question, up to a certain point, children are very solidly identified with and identified to their parents and/or teachers they find acceptable. Yet as they grow older, they develop their own peer groups and associations and especially in the teen and “YA” years their peer group individuates from adult society. The age range from roughly 15-25 or so is spent trying to dissociate from the parent generation. At times the avoidance of adults is fairly generalized and at times it’s more tuned to specific people or their
character traits or opinions they’ve expressed. Coming from one teen it’s one thing, but if you get several teens/YA to have the same reaction against someone or something, it becomes somewhat normative. Thus, create a sufficiently objectionable character in a sufficiently popular YA novel and you’ve just normalized a specific disdain into a large number of the upcoming generation.

Honestly, even in our 50s, those of us who saw Star Wars (IV) in our late teens/early 20s have spent most of our lives trying rather desperately at times to not be Darth Vader or Grand Moff Tarkin. “Abandon ship, in our moment of triumph? I think not!” Did whoever wrote that line, write into our generation a serious degree of caution that doesn’t ever think we’ve won until we’re damn certain of it?

Of course, this same phenomenon, of aligning to an age-peer group while becoming almost antithetically opposed to elders beyond a certain age and/or of certain outlooks, explains the requirement to have a young protagonist. Anything else would be almost summarily rejected by most off the target audience.

BK: Perhaps the best means of circumventing it might be to drop the concept of Readability Levels entirely, and encourage young children to expand their reading material up to the college level early on, when the nerves are still plastic and semantics easily skimmed, before having them return for critical analysis at the close of Secondary Education.

They tried that with me, and the jury’s still out on how well that turned out. The good side of it is that there’s no question that I’m literate, but then again, there was no question that I was literate when I was in second or third grade. Yet the general opinion, insofar as I have been able to get at it, is that having sopped up so much wordage without necessarily being firmly grounded in the disciplines behind the words, allowed me to be over-estimated by people trying to do placement assessments, meaning that I was skimped on the basics in many ways. In many subjects, it is possible to speak well in those subjects without being deeply grounded in them. Perhaps this is especially the case in those of us who glossed over the unfamiliar or difficult parts, letting context fill in the blanks sufficiently so as to move on to the next bit of story. I was into my early twenties before I really understood this, and started to take pains to check the dictionary, encyclopedia, any experts I could find, to try to fill in the blanks. It may be valuable indeed to have YA-level works available so that kids have no choice but to read adults works, and incorrectly fill-in-the-blanks with miscomprehended guesswork.

If anyone has the time, patience, and energy to write a YA about some bewildered adult discovering that they’d have been a lot better informed and a more precise thinker if only they’d read more YA, and then they read that YA and their mental faculties all start falling into place, because it’s never to late to have your second childhood… I will leave this to the reader as an exercise to determine whether or not I am taking the piss. In any case, it may have been nearly done as such, already, and done well. Consider whether or not Stephenson’s The Diamond Age ought perhaps to be thought of as YA, or perhaps as what YA ought to want to be.

@ScottC: You and I read about the same stuff in about the same timeframes, I think. However, I was able to read the “Perelandra” CS Lewis but didn’t at all “get it” because of the heavy religious influence… I pretty much glossed over that. Yet in later years, when pondering anything remotely theological, I find myself deeply informed by those first experiences with that sort of thought. Somehow I never could stomach all of that “Narnia” stuff.

Folks, where do we categorize John Christopher’s “Tripods” books, which were pretty clearly aimed at the 12-15 age group? Or the likes of Howard’s “Conan” books, HP Lovecraft, or L. Sprague DeCamp? My same friends who read A Clockwork Orange also were passing around copies of the Conan books, Lovecraft was definitely all the rage in the teen literati crew, boys’ division. A taste for sword-and-sorcery leads perhaps inevitably to Fritz Leiber by way of “Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser”. These latter generally wouldn’t fit the list, above, of what’s YA. But would Kipling’s “Just So Stories”, specifically the “Jungle Book” tales about Mowgli? Hint: Shere Khan is the Mean Old Man.

ScottC: A fellow Saint fan. At least by pre-teen library card tatstes. *High Five*.

Yeah – awesome early introduction to the Implacable Man of Violence trope. It’s often shrouded in layers of quaint Edwardian Englishness and – by today’s standards – shocking jingoism, but when you peel that back, there’s something really quite frightening about Simon Templar – to the extent that on occasion he even frightens himself. Charters opened the lid for me on the idea that violence, rather than being good or bad, was something far beyond those concepts, something ancient and atavistic that you could unleash – but that once you had unleashed it, it was very hard and costly to put back in the box.

Deseret:

Look, forget education, age, and whether or not kids today are dumber/worse educated or whatever. When you write with a certain complexity you cut off perhaps half of a potential market.

This. I think of YA as sort of the literary equivalent of the PG-13 summer blockbuster. Broad appeal, not hard on the brain, something that (generally) parents won’t feel uncomfortable letting their kids experience, and yet, when well-executed, it is something that even people with sophisticated intellects and tastes can enjoy. YA hasn’t exploded as a category because “young adults” lacked stuff to read. It’s exploded as a category because when it clicks with a broad audience, it really fucking sells because a lot of people can enjoy it on some level.

Richard Morgan: The problem arises when you gift your young protagonists with cheap narrative primacy. […] To any maturing teenager who’s paying attention, that has to ring colossally false.

Absolutely. It can be tricky to make the case that featuring unrealistically competent children and teens in lead roles in books that also feature any number of other fantastic elements or implausible scenarios is any big deal, but it comes down to the old internal consistency argument. Just because a television show features zombies, doesn’t mean that unicorns are equally welcome. You’re trying to sell a specific set of fantastic ideas to a reader without divorcing them entirely from a recognizable reality. Super-kids were often that one step too many that brings the whole thing crashing down.

Furthermore, it made me angry–I *wanted* to buy what the author was selling. I wanted to take the spaceships,dinosaurs, robots, monsters, aliens, etc. seriously. Why are you pitching me these ideas with one hand, and with the other declaring it to be juvenile fare by so clearly targeting children? It gives the sense that the author doesn’t think their own ideas are something to be taken seriously by adults, which is where I suppose my feelings of being talked down to came from. Most legitimate science fiction authors took their ideas seriously, and presented them as things adults would be concerned with. I wanted to feel validated in my appetite for these ideas, not feel like I was sitting at the kids table.

I don’t want to overstate the case, as their was plenty of fiction I enjoyed that featured young protagonists. But I always enjoyed it despite them, not because of them. YA might be huge right now, but I suspect it’s simply because it’s the bulk of what’s being made for people with a taste for accessible, serialized fantasy, not necessarily because people are seeking it out. Adults might be buying it for their kids with the mistaken assumption that just because it features young characters, that young readers will like it. However, I think that aspect of YA success is completely incidental.

I had my mind blown here by discovering that Dune would have been a YA novel. But I didn’t show up for Dune because of the teen protagonist fighting a corrupt system and avenging a dead parent. I came for the Gom Jabbars, the giant sandworms, the feudalistic warfare and intrigue, the evolved metahumans with freaky powers, and the fact that people were running around with bags of their own filth strapped to their bodies (cool!).

Left to their own devices and free from cynical marketing, kids show up for the cool concepts and adventure. I fear they increasingly also show up for the much stronger sense of an event-driven shared pop culture than we had when I was young, and the exploitable FoMO. It feels like publishers are just chasing that jackpot of being the “next Big Thing” by churning out variations on a theme of the previous Big Things and waiting for one to hit. This would be fine if so much other stuff wasn’t getting thrown under the bus in their scramble, and authors that would have otherwise chosen to write something more sophisticated weren’t being co-opted for the chase.

Ms. Rowling may have unwittingly set back an entire generation of young readers with her runaway success. I’m sure she’s a lovely person, though.
.

Mr Non-Entity:

@ScottC: You and I read about the same stuff in about the same timeframes, I think. However, I was able to read the “Perelandra” CS Lewis but didn’t at all “get it” because of the heavy religious influence… I pretty much glossed over that. Yet in later years, when pondering anything remotely theological, I find myself deeply informed by those first experiences with that sort of thought. Somehow I never could stomach all of that “Narnia” stuff.

Oh, I don’t want to come off as Narnia bashing in any way. That stuff is fine, if you’re comfortable with the allegory. It’s just that by the time my relatives were trying to foist that on me, I was already so far beyond that sort of thing, and had developed my own early literary snobbery–a tradition which I continue in this fine thread. C.S. Lewis is a tough sell to a kid who is reading hard sci-fi, Lovecraft, and trashy spy novels. Just used it as an example of adults being out of touch with where kids really are, reading-wise.

.

Mr. Stross hit upon some interesting things there. I do think maybe a line can be drawn to the Marvel and DC movies to suggest there’s some correlation between “YA” and hero worship in pop culture. Not to mention the attempt to turn Fantastic Four into a YA thing (no pun intended).

Speaking of which, kind of a side point, but has anyone mentioned there’s also the “protagonist is extra especially special from the start” thing? Perhaps not always, but a some born a monarch (Jupiter Ascending) or otherwise a chosen one, Didn’t follow Eclipse to the end, so don’t know if Bella meets this criteria from the get-go. It’s one thing to be special because all this stuff happened but another because of bloodline, etc.

I think it would be presumptuous to assume that modern teenagers with their Twilights and Hunger Games and assorted apocalypses and dystopias aren’t also enjoying the likes of, say, Stephen King (still), Gillian Flynn, George RR Martin and EL James and no doubt others – popular, literary, classic, modern – whatever. They have the kind of access – and encouragement – bookish kids of my age couldn’t even dream of outside of sneaking in to live in a library. The safer assumption is that the avid readers are freely grabbing stuff from YA AND adult shelves. Nobody built a wall around YA and said ‘thus far and no further till you’re 18.’

Mr Non-Entity: They tried that with me, and the jury’s still out on how well that turned out.

I think assuming that because a kid is smart enough to read without prompting they need minimal guidance is potentially disastrous. Reading for sensation can preclude the development of focus, discipline and intellectual rigour which can leave someone foundering badly, but still putting up a good front, when they get to college.

Richard Morgan: YA fictions seem hellbent on telling teenagers that they are special, singled out, important, nay *vital*, in the scheme of things. That their choices and desires have vast, wide-ranging consequences for the world at large. To any maturing teenager who’s paying attention, that has to ring colossally false.

Without for one second suggesting that such fictions don’t exist in YA, I think first of all, it’s also fair to say that it also exists across adult entertainments and for adult protagonists. It’s just as tiresome in both. It’s also not as endemic or essential in YA as you seem to suggest, otherwise the Chaos Walking Trilogy by Patrick Ness would not have been a bestseller. Where it does exist, it is often in the form of responsibility being thrust suddenly and horribly onto someone poorly prepared who will have to struggle and make mistakes and pay a terrible price for it. They can be so far removed from wish-fulfillment power fantasies that as an adult I find it poignant and wish the kids would go easier on themselves.

Guildenstern42 – This. I think of YA as sort of the literary equivalent of the PG-13 summer blockbuster.

The Hunger Games is YA, yes. So is MT Anderson’s The Astonishing Life Of Octavian Nothing, Traitor To The Nation which is one of the most incredible books I’ve ever read. I’m starting to think that the more definitive the opinions the less contact the opinion-holders have had with the breadth and depth of modern YA fiction in particular, and modern children’s fiction in general. (Not necessarily directed at you in particular Guildenstern42.)

ScottC – Left to their own devices and free from cynical marketing, kids show up for the cool concepts and adventure.

Is there any reason to suppose that they’re not getting these things from their current reading material? Furthermore is there any reason to suppose that there is really a difficulty in them identifying with young protagonists when the shelves are packed with books featuring young protagonists and the bestseller lists likewise? This is getting increasingly into ‘no, it’s the children who are wrong’ territory.

Onlooker – I’d propose some themes are likely to be of less interest to most YA readers,

Themes you can find in current YA: loss, grief, sexism, racism, mental illness, failure, child abuse, violence, crime, social disintegration and environmental collapse. This is not a definitive list. There is some dumb escapism in there too.

Richard Morgan:
Hey Charlie – saludos

In fact, I’m pretty sure the fiction we consume when we’re young actually plays a big part in our emotional development – and that’s part of my gripe.I have a nasty sneaking suspicion that the YA insistence on youthful protagonist primacy blunts and truncates an emerging edge of curiosity that the large majority of kids own as part of their standard operating system.

I’m with you on the emphasis on a youthful protagonist being spurious. Am thinking back to reading “Pebble in the Sky” by Asimov, aged ~8-10; protagonist is 65, gets whizzed into a post-apocalyptic future Earth where everyone aged over 60 has to report to their local recycling center for euthanasia (because radiation hand-wave — hey, it was an early 50’s novel). While the emphasis on the protagonist’s age was a bit out of the ordinary in my then-experience, it didn’t stop me enjoying the novel at the time: and in structure, “Pebble in the Sky” would hit all the high notes for YA fiction today except for the protagonist’s age.

But Nigel makes a good point about the emerging edge of curiosity. Fiction can’t actively blunt it; all it can do is not feed it. If they keep reading, they’ll get to stuff that stretches their minds eventually. The big risk as I see it is that they’ll get bored with reading first, like so many late teens, and never go back to it.

I’m sorry, by the way, I don’t mean to blind you with titles, most of which you’ll only have my dubious opinion of to go on. I just want to broaden out the idea of what YA is.

If kids, as I believe, are going to show up for the hook regardless, why not use it as an excuse to mix in more challenging and sophisticated fare, the same way one might stir high nutrient vegetables into the buttery mound of mash potato on a child’s plate?

And again, and I really hate to rudely harp on this (and I stand mortified for roaring ‘Horseshit!’ and ‘Bollocks!’ earlier in the thread) how do you know they’re not? If you’ve read extensively in the age-group then fair enough; if not, I refer you to my previous comment with the plethora of what I regard as challenging and sophisticated fare, of which there is no shortage.

If we are representative of some portion of child readers, then what has changed since then? Has it changed?

I suspect a number of things have changed. Mostly I think having young protagonists in books for young people seems like a natural thing to do and as the market exploded, they became the norm. It isn’t as if the books are devoid of adult characters of various types. The only real harm it does, I think, is reinforce a spurious received wisdom that YA books HAVE to have young protagonists.

I had been wondering, though, if someone would extol the virtue of modern YA for it being comparatively free of the unfortunate cultural rough edges of a lot of older fiction, or at least more self-aware in this regard.

Not me, boss. Teach the controversy, says I. Modern YA has its own rough edges, though they might not be as obvious to a modern audience in the same way contemporaneous readers of Burroughs, Lovecraft et al might have breezed past some aspects of their writing. Age might just be one sort of diversity it can lack, there are others.

The problems is, most of the YA fantasy I’ve seen is relatively mundane in comparison to more niche science fiction and fantasy that isn’t being deliberately constructed to try and become a pop culture blockbuster.

Cheating a little here, but one of the strangest, starkest and most beautiful works of fantasy of recent years came out of YA – not strictly a YA novel, but the third book in a children’s fantasy trilogy completed after many many years – Boneland by Alan Garner. Um. I better not start listing titles and authors again, I’d be starting to repeat myself. I don’t regard my reading in YA as extensive by any means, but I know enough to recognise that the deliberate efforts to construct pop culture blockbuster phenomena are often trailing behind something innovative and challenging that came out of apparently nowhere. The creative churn in children’s fiction is actually pretty intimidating when you start looking closer.

It feels more than a little condescending to suggest that a generation that has such a vast reservoir of human knowledge at their fingertips is going to be severely undermined by lack of exposure to a more challenging and diverse selection of a declining artform.

My argument would be that it’s more than a little condescending to suggest that this particular section of the artform, thriving as it is, is neither challenging nor diverse.

@Nigel

Without getting into another quote-a-thon, I suspect that one of the things that is preventing some of us from seeing eye to eye with you on this subject, is where you’re having this conversation. You’re on a the blog of a writer of diamond-hard science fiction, surrounded by other science fiction authors and fans. Right or not, we’re likely to value certain things more than others. So when I classify something as “mundane”, I want you to understand where I’m coming from.

You’re citing a number of literate human themes that are well trodden in literature of all kinds as an example of why YA is just as good as all of our cranky old person fiction. These are fine things. I would argue that they are things well covered in plenty of other superior fiction through the decades, but fine things nonetheless.

But where are the Big Ideas?

When I was around 11 years of age (really, really wish I could stop making points without prefacing them with “when I was a kid”, btw), I used to run though logic experiments in my head, thinking how I would interpret certain courses of action through Asimov’s elegant Three Laws of Robotics (and yes, I had enough of a sense of self -preservation to make sure that no one ever, ever knew that I did this).

What is the modern equivalent for YA readers? Wondering which house in Hogwart’s rigid caste system they would be separated into (one of a number of troubling ideas from that series)? Whether you would rather bang the hunky werewolf, or the hunky vampire? Which character will live and die in the latest dystopian soap opera?

Where are the expansive, life-changing, head-stretching Big Ideas? And I’m not just talking about hard science fiction. While some here no doubt scoff at the value of ideas not rigidly rooted in plausible science, I’m not one of them. Implausible ideas can still be Big, and still be head-stretching. I wish that, like Dr. Watts, I could claim something as heady as Solaris as the game-changer, but for me it was reading David Brin’s Startide Rising in the early 80s, and just being blown away by the notion of baddass, sentient dolphin cyborgs in exo-suits. That book ruined me for other fiction for a good while. Even pure whimsy has value. China Mieville’s (who I understand has done plenty of YA fiction himself) Perdido Street Station has a more scorchingly imaginative idea to page ratio than any YA I’m aware of (though I’m nowhere near as fluent in the youth market as yourself). I would have killed for that book as a kid.

So when I call it mundane, I’m just saying that comparatively speaking, so much YA I see is simply the worst thing that science fiction or fantasy can be–it’s unremarkable. It’s fantasy pastiche, or light science fiction without teeth or ambition. No doubt you can cite examples to challenge my opinions, but then I’m also confident I could cite two superior books off the top of my head for every one of yours that wasn’t written down to a “youth level” that nevertheless is perfectly within their ability to read–as long as people weren’t feeding them low-challenge fare during the period in their lives when their minds are the hungriest, most curious, and most flexible they’ll ever be.

I think that accessible, grounded fiction written to introduce young readers to adult themes and situations is a fine thing. It was certainly a thing when I was a kid. But it existed alongside many other interesting options that I believe children’s minds will naturally gravitate to, left unhindered and un-scorned for doing so. The problem now, is that the YA market is becoming the standard for much speculative fiction, to the degree that those other options are being choked off, and it’s absorbing adult readers as well.

I think it’s great if a writer wants to write about important adult themes down to a level they think will make it easier for kids to understand, and they can find success doing that. But Dr. Watts is suggesting that some writers who want to do something more ambitious are finding they’re being compelled to fit into this YA mold to find any success. I think that is an absolute tragedy.

.

Peter (and Richard) – I wonder how John Green factors into your definition of YA. Green is considered one of the most prominent Ya authors out there, yet his novels, while written in an accessible language, deal with rather complex and un-sexy subject matter (cancer, loss, depression), have no SF element at all so no dystopia (other than the one we already live in), and tend to have tragic or at best bitter-sweet plot resolution.

Oh, and Harry Potter would not have been able to go back to visit his parents – the spell is limited to only going back a few hours (I assume magic time pixies take care of preventing the possibility of using the time turner again while already being back in time).

Yukon Val:
ScottC, I would suggest many people can love Peter’s work AND work by other writers, in many genres. Let’s not presume to judge the actual merits of various types of writing by “I like this and not that”. So snooty!

I’m not aware of having done this. I’m pretty sure I’ve listed all sorts of work in various genres I’ve enjoyed in my life, and made a *point* of not limiting it to hard sci-fi. The difference being the examples I listed I don’t see as purposely “writing down” to a younger audience. But since we are on a sci fi blog, it’s understood that many here probably favor the sci-fi and fantasy section of the bookstore.

And I’ve really enjoyed Nigel’s contributions for the most part. Not so much yours.

Seriously, if you want young people to,like, read, actual, books, then the bun-fights about good versus bad TYPES of stories are not the way to go… And, wasn’t that whole point of this rant, in the first place?

I don’t believe that to be the case, no.

.

Yukon Val: So snooty! Seriously, if you want young people to, like, read, actual, books, then the bun-fights about good versus bad TYPES of stories are not the way to go

It’s a little more complicated than that. The problem is not any particular book, or type of book – it’s a broad marketing and production tendency that sets out to assure young people, just as they’re trying the concept of adulthood on for size, just as they’re starting to stretch themselves, that *there is no need to do that*. Why bother diving into the broad ocean of literature and testing yourself against its waters, when we’ve got this lovely little heated pool *designed especially for you*. Why try? You might not like it. You might struggle. You might have to up your game. Who wants to have to do that?

That is a pernicious message to be propagating.

If all the custom-written YA stuff was simply termed Children’s Literature (as it once used to be) I wouldn’t have any issue with it at all – because that label will by definition ensure that those teens who *want* to stretch themselves will abandon the pool in favour of broader waters as soon as they feel that itch. Those happy in the warmth and calm of the pool will stick around longer. The honest acceptance that *this is fiction for children* creates a perfect self selection dynamic.

And we could go back to accepting that there is no such fucking patronising middle ground thing as a “Young Adult”, that you’re either an adult or you’re not.

Yukon Val: But where are the Big Ideas?

Not sure how this fits into complaints about YA…constraints on YA writers. I have not read much recent YA, so can’t speak to its inclusion in the genre, as a whole

Well, you’re pulling that from the end of a long, evolving, and mostly civil discussion between Nigel and myself where we had gone off on a tangent about how “cool concepts” serve as a hook to young readers. I don’t blame you if the walls of text erected in this thread are too much to bother with, but unless you’re willing to start at the beginning, you may want to dial back your umbrage a little and do a bit less cherry picking.

****

That said, this topic was started by a noted science fiction author on his blog, it was framed from the perspective of someone who read challenging sci-fi when they were young rather than targeted fiction, and it listed a proposed set of criteria that implied speculative elements like dystopias. The most prominent YAs are light sci-fi or fantasy, and genre writers, either through choice or market pressure are increasingly flocking to the YA banner.

So yeah, this topic has everything to do with the soul of the sci-fi genre in popular fiction. I may have taken this for granted and slipped too easily into discussing it without sending up enough qualifiers for your tastes, but you’re kidding yourself if you don’t think this discussion is about that.

If you read back further, you might notice me saying that everyone is snobbish about something. If you go back to my first post, I mentioned how much of the more challenging fare (sci fi and otherwise) being listed here was considered “Young adult” by the days standards. Plenty of people then, as now, consider anything that with a touch of the fantastic to be kids fare–beneath them.

In return *I* consider science fiction to be the greatest literary genre. I think at its best, it offers vitally important things no other genre does. I think humanity would be better off if everyone read it, in its most wildly ambitious and undiluted form.

So yeah. You’re goddamn right I’m snobbish about it.
.

ScottC, I did read the posts…and I had no problem with many/most of the things you said, but disagree with the notion that posters here don’t agree with Nigel, in general, because Peter’s blog (and its readers) favour science fiction above other things. I don’t think that is true of Peter’s fans and readers and I don’t even think it is necessarily true of the posters in this thread, some of whom seemed to be disagreeing with Peter (in various ways) and agreeing with Nigel. And, yes people used to dismiss science fiction as childish…some still do. It looks to me like you (and Peter) and Richard Morgan are being dismissive about current YA in exactly the same kind of way. This seems really counterproductive to me. I thought it was understood that young people should be encouraged to read as broadly as possible so that they find what they like/are inspired by, not just read what adults/others think is good for them or believe is somehow better to read.

And, before other folks jump in about constraints on YA (specifically Young Adult) writers, I agree that a specific list would be a problem, but I see much generalized criticism of YA in the comments here: simplified language, young protagonists, happy endings. When Nigel provided an extensive list of books that (he says) illustrate that YA books are extremely diverse, we are back to the marketing problem.

When did the “Young Adult” marketing problem emerge? Can anyone identify specific novels written under the strategy? What evidence is there that this type of fiction is actually suffering in recent years as a result of this marketing strategy? Is this kind of problem really unique to YA? Is there nothing similar in other genres? Some adult genres seem really narrow. Are other types of authors encouraged to fit themselves into very narrow storyframing?

Because I’m still seeing a great deal of choice for young readers…more choice than any of us (likely) had as teens (not really sure of everyone’s ages here, so I could be wrong)…but, more than I had, for sure. And I have no idea why modern teens would stop reading beyond a designated category, be it ever so narrowly constructed/marketed. I read everything I could get my hands on, including things I was told were explicitly NOT for me. Are young people more rule-oriented now? That seems unlikely to me and dismissive of them.

Peter, I think your comments about your versus Nigel’s information is a bit bonkers. Sure, I encountered both types of information through you, but your’s is essentially hearsay. To be clear, I believe you are accurately relaying the thoughts and opinions of the panelists, but none of us here can talk to those folks directly to confirm or expand on their opinions. On the other hand, Nigel provided titles/authors to show the diversity of YA (in general). Anyone here can look up the titles/authors he provided to determine for themselves if what he says is true. You would have to read whole books to learn whether the endings are generally “uplifting”, obviously, but diversity of protagonists, setting (dystopian or not), “chosen one” versus Joe/Jane central casting, levels of violence, tone, simplicity of language and all sorts of other information is available from blurbs and reviews. The books illustrate whether YA is more diverse than you think. If you are now saying that Nigel’s list is not relevant because this development (the list, the constraints on writers) is so new that his list doesn’t reflect it, then I’m back to whether anyone has seem the consequences of these constraints.

ScottC,

I’m putting together a list because I enjoy reading and I read books classified as YA. I enjoy well written books. (actually, sometimes I enjoy horrible books too).

Your second question is a lot for me to unpack, and the idea of deliberateness is throwing me for a loop. All genres are going to have books that are deliberately written to fit a genre. YA is not unique in this, therefore I cannot answer your question very well. I am served well by reading books I enjoy. I read very quickly, so it’s not entirely a zero sum game.

Have you read Karl Schroeder and Paolo Bacigalupi? I love their work. Maybe you’d enjoy their YA books? I usually ready anything they publish, which means I’ve read their YA as well.

Sheila:

I’m putting together a list because I enjoy reading and I read books classified as YA. I enjoy well written books. (actually, sometimes I enjoy horrible books too).

Your second question is a lot for me to unpack, and the idea of deliberateness is throwing me for a loop. All genres are going to have books that are deliberately written to fit a genre.

Maybe I phrased it poorly. Genre is a separate issue. The consensus here seems to be that YA is written to deliberately prioritize accessibility (simpler language), youth P.O.V. (young protagonists), and a “youthful mindset”, whatever that means.

I was genuinely curious as to what you as an adult reader were finding in, say, a YA book about shrubbery, vs a less filtered garden variety book about shrubbery? Why would you seek out the former over the latter? Am I missing the boat?

Oh, and to be clear, I read plenty of trash. If all my literary sins were laid bare, I’d never be allowed back on the ‘Crawl, so I’m not judging.
.

Mr Non-Entity – I mean, write a story about kids caught up in a disastrous conflict between cultures and economic systems all as a result of failure of political policy to adapt to advances in chemistry

A few years ago I was toying vaguely with writing a story about children surviving on a planet completely covered in rubbish. Then this came out:

http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/204471/trash-by-andy-mulligan/9780385752169/

And I realised that the reason a lot of YA sf takes the form it does – big crude apocalyptic or dystopic metaphors – is because the real hard stuff is being lived right now all around us.

ScottC – I think it’s great if a writer wants to write about important adult themes down to a level they think will make it easier for kids to understand, and they can find success doing that.

I would generally agree that Big SF Ideas tend not to get broken in YA. Francis Hardinge’s Twilight Robbery is fantasy, but it does have one of the most innovative and original set-ups I’ve seen in ages. I just think it’s an odd complaint about books aimed at an audience that is in the process of discovering all the ideas that are out there and for whom many of the ideas that you and I are familiar with are new and big. Plus, there are other areas to explore that have nothing to do with simplifying big ideas. There’s the story of a boy with tourette’s, or of conjoined twins, told in verse, growing up trans, or a family affected by alzheimer’s, or rape culture in a small town, or a girl who kills everyone she touches (a random sampling from this year’s YA Prize nominees.)

http://www.thebookseller.com/ya-book-prize/2016/shortlisted-books#

YA is not short of ideas. Not the three laws of robotics or intelligence as an evolutionary dead end or the various esoterics of physics I do love in hard sf but am actually pretty crap at, but the ideas are there. Just smaller ideas about life and growing up and surviving, and I think they’re important and I don’t think they’re being done this way outside of YA.

I do kind of agree with you about science fiction YA – it’s not the smartest iteration of the genre, in general, though that’s often down to focus on character and plot rather than innovations in worldbuilding and ideas. I disagree about YA fantasy – outside the obviously derivative stuff there’s some world-class work I would put beside any adult work. See comments above for examples.

Peter Watts – Actually, it has been published.

And actually her work has been on my wish-list for about a year now! After reading some Mary Renault I was interested in a modern take on Theseus and The Door In The Mountain was HIGHLY recommended.

And many of Nigel’s examples date from a time before YA even existed as a marketing category

While you are correct that my sampling of YA is NOT extensive enough to make me anything like an authority, most of my recommendations were consciously selected from the last ten years, and quite a few from the last two or three years.

that kind of fiction has suffered in favor of the cookie-cutter dystopias that other authors are apparently being told to write.

The weird thing is, from my perspective, that kind of fiction is thriving quietly in the shadow of cookie-cutter dystopian nonsense. I get that authors being instructed to write a certain way to certain rules is what you’re focusing on, and quite rightly, too. That shit is bogus, as the kids are all saying these days.

ScottC – Do you think YA is covering ideas or themes not well served by other fiction that isn’t being deliberately written for accessibility and youth P.O.V?

Sorry to cut in, but if I were to recommend YA books that do things I haven’t really seen done in adult books, then it would be MT Anderson’s Octavian Nothing (historical) and Margo Langan’s (fantasy) novels. Unique, original, devastating books written and published as YA, deserve to be read by everyone. It occurs to be me that the thing about YA science fiction is that they do tend to quite consciously, almost explicitly, really about the here and now. So I wouldn’t recommend Louise O’Neill’s Only Ever Yours as a unique and original piece of science fiction, but I would recommend it as a unique and original and utterly dreadful take on modern rape culture.

(Sophie McDougall’s Mars Evacuees looks light it might be a really fun pure science fiction romp, but alas I’ve not read it yet.)

a “youthful mindset”, whatever that means.

These are simply creative stylistic choices that can be read and enjoyed as works of literary craft, the same as any other creative literary choices can be read and enjoyed. The latter in particular, since the majority of YA writers are adults, is simply a question of voice and empathic imagination no different than conjuring up a mindset through voice and empathic imagination in any work of literature. Some put more emphasis into it than others, some succeed better than others.

By the way, Scott, I found you neither douchey nor condescending. These are valid questions, and I have enjoyed this whole thread. It has forced me to formulate and articulate my ideas and thoughts about children’s literature, and whether others agree with me or not, at least I can be sure those thoughts and ideas have been challenged and questioned a little, an invaluable process. I hope, more than anything, that commenters here find a few good books out of my mess of suggestions.

Thanks Peter, everyone.

I’m currently watching season 2 of the anime Knights of Sidonia based on a manga by Tsutomu Nihei. Nihei is kind of a Japanese manga Peter Watts, his stories are extremely dark and forbidding post apocalyptic sci fi, usually a single nonhuman character wandering around some post-singularity hellscape. Then he came up with this, which is a giant robots fight aliens anime with an ensemble cast and lots of teenage romance, but, and here’s the but, once you watch it you see that even though he’s paying lip service to alot of the quintessentially YA anime tropes, he’s still keeping true to his themes underneath.

And well, it got adapted to anime so ka-ching for him I guess! (It’s on netflix, I believe they coproduced it)

ScottC,

I wasn’t offended. Maybe a little irked due to it starting to feel like one of those “would you rather lose your sight or your hearing” type of questions, and you probably didn’t mean it that way.

Anyway, it is safe to bet we have overlap in books we like, but I bet there is also a big disjunct. There is nothing wrong with that. one example, I like illustrated things: Shaun Tan (The Lost Thing), Zach Weinersmith (Augie and The Green Night), something recently collecting illustrations from field biologist notebooks maybe? (I ihaven’t read that one yet).

Oh, and as another thing I’ve been thinking through in this entire thread — there is the protective instinct going on with children. I remain agnostic on whether there are deleterious cognitive affects. Maybe it’s only sarcasm/hyperbole vs. speculation. If it’s speculation, citations needed. This reminds me of violent games, heavy metal, rock and roll, and whatever my parents were worried about. Do I need to protect kids from books? Probably not.

Take care. I am still enjoying the discussion. I will try not to rehash things.

Just when I thought I was out… Seriously though, I cannot resist people talking about books.

Nigel: I do kind of agree with you about science fiction YA – it’s not the smartest iteration of the genre, in general, though that’s often down to focus on character and plot rather than innovations in worldbuilding and ideas.

I don’t think you have to have one or the other. I don’t see a problem with children who were given real books to read when their minds were the hungriest they’ll ever be, rather than being inoculated with weakened strains of the real thing, being able to latch onto something like Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon The Deep. That book is story and character driven, to an even greater degree in the recent sequel which actually shifted to younger protagonists in more of an adventure story, but still comes packed with all sorts of mind bending explorations of scientific speculation. Or Startide Rising. Or Dune. All plot driven.

If I can read Poe, Mark Twain, HG Wells, Jules Verne, Conan Doyle, Melville, Dickens, Stevenson, Lovecraft, Howard, Bradbury, Clarke, Asimov, Herbert, Heinlein, all by the time I’m 11 or 12, then anyone can. I can barely dress and feed myself.

I disagree about YA fantasy – outside the obviously derivative stuff there’s some world-class work I would put beside any adult work. See comments above for examples.

Well, this is the one that makes me leery. I have to ask how much “regular” fantasy fiction you read. Because if there were one genre definitely not in need of a YA treatment, it’s fantasy. Most of it has ever skewed towards young adults in an organic fashion. Young protagonists of destiny are a dime a dozen. Even George R. R. Martin’s lurid ASoIaF series features mostly child/teen prota…HOLY SHIT GAME OF THRONES IS YA!

There are crazy, mind-bendingly imaginative works of adult fantasy, so it would take quite a bit to impress me on that score. As an adult reader, I’m less impressed by YA that is “Good for a YA book” because it features adult themes. Adult themes are a trick that old fashioned normal fiction mastered a long time ago. While the sort of adult themes you’re citing to me are fine, valuable things, they don’t sound like anything that wouldn’t be par for the course on your average NPR book spotlight or Oprah list for regular fiction.

As a consumer of fantasy fiction, I wouldn’t have a bone to pick with your YA if it wasn’t starting to drink my milkshake. I found Joe Abercrombie’s trope-subverting First Law trilogy and associated novels with their profane, world weary Northmen and moral ambiguity to be enjoyable and refreshing from the increasingly youth oriented fantasy genre. I would have loved those books as a kid. But like so many other others, he moved into the YA genre either by choice or market pressure. I’m sure those books make a fine story, but no matter how you rationalize it (he frames it as “part adult fiction, part youth novel), he’s now writing away from me as an audience. Please no one bother trying to sell me on them either…I’m sure they’re a good read, but I’m not yet desperate enough for reading material that I need to raid the YA section.

Nigel: It occurs to be me that the thing about YA science fiction is that they do tend to quite consciously, almost explicitly, really about the here and now.

Which leads into the debate raging across the Sci-fi audience at present on whether contemporary science fiction has lost it’s big speculative, scientifically-oriented ideas in favor of mundane social commentary. But I digress.

Nigel: I wonder if people react very, very badly to the idea of so much cynical marketing manipulation being directed at vulnerable, malleable children, which is fair enough.

I don’t think most people here are approaching the debate with that in mind. Most seem to be concerned with the effects of coddling teens with low challenge fiction, and the implications for the market and society in general. As I’ve stated, my objections are mostly self-interested. You want to feed your kid strained carrots long after the point they should be eating solid food, that’s your call. But those choices are driving the market, and have ramifications for stuff I care about.

One thing that kids *don’t* need protection from is adult prose, characters, and vocabulary.

Nigel: Sorry to cut in, but if I were to recommend YA books that do things I haven’t really seen done in adult books, then it would be MT Anderson’s Octavian Nothing (historical) and Margo Langan’s (fantasy) novels. Unique, original, devastating books written and published as YA, deserve to be read by everyone.

First off, I’ll just observe that if we have to start referring to regular fiction as “adult books”, then that’s already a disaster brought about by the swelling youth market.

Otherwise,ok, I’ll bite. I’ll check one of these out. I like fantasy so let me just investigate Margo Langan…let’s see, wikipedia bibliography contains predominantly…Teenage Romances. Do you hate me, Nigel? What did I ever do to you? Ok, here we go. Two entries under “Fantasy Fiction”. The more notable one seems to be something called, Tender Morsels. I’m already dying inside, but let me just read the synopsis: “Based on the Brothers Grimm story of “Snow White and Rose Red”, this novel tells the story of 15-year-old motherless Liga, abused by her father, and pregnant with her second child – the first being forcibly miscarried. As she attempts to take her own life she is transported to a magical place, a haven from the real world where she is safe from threat…”

Ok, so maybe that Octavian Nothing thing then. I like historical fiction too. I promise I will check that out. But if it turns out to be something I can effortlessly say, “yeah, that’s nice and all, BUT…”, and point to a half dozen more worthy reads in regular fiction, I’m going to shake my fist at the sky and yell, “NIGELLLL”, and fling a copy of the The City & The City (fantasy), along with a Patrick O’Brian novel (historical..read them in my teens) in your general direction.

There’s no foul here Nigel. As I said, I suspect we are two different people who value different things in our reading material. I don’t want to scorn any adult reading YA…I’ve read plenty of it myself as an adult, usually incidentally or out of curiosity. Actually seeking it out as an adult is concept I struggle with, though. On balance, I just don’t have the time (middle aged people become increasingly aware of time for some reason) to read below my comfort level, when there are still more interesting things to me on the shelf.

Peter Watts: But the credibility of a source should not hinge on whether you personally happened to be in the audience.

Yeah, the “you can’t authoritatively dismiss something you don’t know” argument is always dicey. I haven’t actually seen anyone here really do that, though Yukon Val came close. I don’t need to sample every light adjunct lager in the store to know that, on average, most light beer is going to taste like yellow corn flake water, and that statistically speaking, I can dismiss it untasted with a high degree of confidence that it wouldn’t suit me. A light beer with the sort of flavor I enjoy in brews would be an extraordinary claim, requiring extraordinary evidence and scrutiny.
.

To cover some new territory, I was wondering if anyone had any insight on the market forces driving YA. Are English speaking markets still the primary market for English fiction, or are they also depending on international sales across different cultural and language barriers?

I thought it may have something in common with the overall downward trend in sophistication and nuance in movie dialogue for any film that cost more than 50 million to make. Since expensive films increasingly rely on overseas income for profit, they need broad dialogue and concepts that can translate more easily.

With Hollywood mining the YA print market for serialized blockbusters, print publishers could be following suit . YA stuff would, in many cases, be much easier to translate across cultural lines.

.

Please excuse a slightly off-topic suggestion, not relevant to YA. On the general topic of dumbing down the language, I think you might either die laughing or chew your own leg off at Randall Munroe’s “Thing Explainer”, a book in which the author (a PhD in physics and ex-NASA contractor who now makes his living from his web comic, xkcd) explains complex stuff using only the ten hundred most commonly used words in English… so, for example, the Saturn V rocket becomes the Up-goer V.

I think it’s actually pretty awesome that “Young Adults” want to read anything at all, and that people are actually writing for them. Yay!!! OK – rose-tinted glasses off, crotchetty blue goggles back on:

This looks like just another symptom of how everyone used to want to be grown, but now everyone (is supposed to) want to be (a) young (adult)? Because literature is definitely not the only domain in which the presumed needs of the youngling are put ahead of those of just about any other demographic / agegroup.

The entire mediascape now prostrates itself before Youth, when just a few centuries if not decades ago it was prostrated before the elders in society (another extreme, granted… but a mite more defensible, since it’s fair to say that a child knows next-to-jack, and one ought to be forgiven for presuming an adult knows a wee bit more). So, the YA memeplex is just a tiny bubble of the giant, ever-frothing, ever-expanding, utterly pernicious space that is defining everything from how we work, live, interact, spend/shop… never mind how we read or what we read. Do we realize that people barely out of “Young Adulthood” are today and tomorrow’s “entrepreneurs”? They’re busy ushering in the brave new world of TOTAL YOUTH. If you think they like to see themselves in their stories, wait till you see who populates the worlds they envision.

For, having been made demigods in the mediascape’s own pet pantheon, naturally it becomes young people in the main, that get reflected in their stories. There’s a parallel at the movies, too. Anyone that finds themselves at the pinnacle of any particular social space demands stories about themselves. That’s kind of how its always worked, and tough cheddar for the aged protagonist, I guess.

Yukon Val: @Kurt…the elephant in the room: […]…they also buy MORE BOOKS than men …

There *is* a slightly less asinine point under Kurt’s statement, and you hit on it there. I’ve seen it suggested by more than a few writers and insiders ( all men, in the interests of full disclosure) that contemporary publishing wisdom is that men don’t buy fiction anymore. It’s therefore very difficult to sell a book that doesn’t favor women’s interests, unless you’re an established author with a following.

I have no idea if this is bullshit or not, and if I’m perpetuating some whiny MRA nonsense please forgive me.

If it is true that publishers have largely abandoned men as a market, it could be that a self-fulfilling feedback loop is being created whereby publishers don’t make things that interest men because “men don’t read”, and men don’t read because there is less and less being made that appeals to them (a.k.a dumb shit for men).

There’s no denying that most of the modern YA fic I’m familiar with (which isnt all that much) skews towards a female audience in my uninformed estimation. It could be that we’re seeing a gender divide as much as a generational one as to the audience’s tolerance for certain things like youth protagonists. Or I could still just be blinded by my own youthful disdain for “kid stories”, having been exposed to a neverending parade of super-awesome adult male heroes and stories that rendered children relatively uninteresting to me.

All I know is that someone has to take the blame for 50 Shades of Grey, and it isn’t going to be me.

.

Frivolous response for today re Thing Explainer

Space Weird Thing.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2015/05/31/space_weird_thing_a_video_parody_of_space_oddity_using_only_common_words.html

my second frivolous response for today. regarding utilitarianism and maximizing happiness

I give you trolley humor
http://existentialcomics.com/comic/106

(maybe I’ll check out these anime recommendations too)

Peter Watts: Are you sure you haven’t posted here under a different name? Maybe under a single letter near the end of the alphabet? The IPs don’t match, but everyone uses VPNs these days (I myself am posting from Italy).

I feel wounded. The only thing I have said against women, on record, is that they ruined democracy because they’ve been wired by evolution to play it safe. Thus their fondness for taxation and welfare. There’s even a nice study showing how taxing and spending rose in various US states after women were enfranchised.

They can have their romance novels, yoga, cosmetics, rags, shoes, handbags, pink guns and all their dumb shit I don’t like, need or care about.

I’m not a feminist asshole, who wishes nothing more than to jump into a genre that belongs predominantly to the other sex, and demand more stuff they like.

Has anyone written an essay demanding that romance writers stop stereotyping men and include more violent, vindictive assholes or paunchy, pathetic passive-aggressive balding wimps in their art?

Peter Watts:

the retirement announcement was satire.

WOOHOO!

Peter Watts:

Nellie was real. At least, we hope to write it someday, if we can find a publisher.

WOOHOO!

Yukon Val: @Kurt…the elephant in the room: women make up just over half the population…they are currently graduating from post-secondary degrees at higher rates than men…they also buy MORE BOOKS than men …they like YA, stupid shit AND great stuff, just like men. They purchase stuff, including books based on their interest/what they think they might enjoy…because they are human beings…
FUUUUUCK!!!!!!

Seconded.

I mean, for fuck’s sake………..:-(

Peter D,

Welcome to the YA novels of Paolo Bacigalupi.

Sheila,
re: Trolly Madness: Thank you. I laughed til i cried, then i bookmarked it.

Cate Corlan,

if you want more laughs here is my small collection of trolley jokes https://pinboard.in/u:sky/t:trolley/

I’ve started to collect the whole set.

Someone needs to add some experimental equipment and do some *Starfish* scenes.

Divers recreate scenes from ‘Sea Hunt’ using vintage equipment.

Richard Morgan: they are currently graduating from post-secondary degrees at higher rates than men

Let’s be honest here. Women also tend to go more for bullshit degrees. (Except certain sciences like biology iirc, and also medicine)

That is why you have relatively more female engineers and programmers and such in developing than developed countries. They are playing it safe and choosing a difficult, somewhat unappealing but well-renumerated line of work.

Meanwhile, privileged white women in Scandinavia can get their coveted degree in Art history or special education or gender studies and go kvetch about gender imbalances in Computer Science studies and be assured their kids won’t go hungry.

ScottC: Classic Y. Now we can get this party started.

Party is over. Women valuing safety over risk is a fact of life. Have you not read book of Oogenesis?

ScottC:
An amusing, if only tangentially related anecdote. It seems that Microsoft’s new chat-bot AI “Tay”, designed to mimic a teenage girl and to learn from its interactions with users, has been taken down less than 24 hours after launch for becoming a racist, sexually charged, Trump-supporting facist.

Guess why. The pendulum has moved to the other side, and counterculture is now rightwing. LGBT and multiculturalism and assorted such memetic faggotry is now officially promoted or endorsed by the state. Thus it has the seal of being completely uncool.

Then there was something like the entirety of game journalists deciding to shit on typical gamers and push their shiny justice and equality and no fun* agenda.. Partly based on a misunderstanding of statistics. and the idiotic notion that game journalists through their pronouncements could somehow shame gamers into altering their preferences for violent, competitive games and the odd glimpse of overly-generous cleavage.

In no way could a coordinated attempt to shame a good part of hormonal teens and grumpy 20-something males by being all patronizing and snarky backfire. No one could have foreseen that.

Now do you see why to teenagers and those fed up with present-day culture are going to the dark side? The dark side doesn’t care what they play. It doesn’t keep lying through its teeth about Islam not being dangerous or glibly claims that integrating a million Arabs into Germany is perfectly doable – when in 30 years Turks haven’t been integrated.

______________________

It’s idiots all the way down. There is no hope for humanity except maybe a highly infectious virus boosting cognition while toning down the need for virtue signalling.

@Y…please write that essay on Romance! The genre is crying out for exactly the kind of open-minded, un-biased analysis you could bring. You will need to read up, though. I’m sure all of us here at the Crawl would happily donate old copies of The Flame and the Flower, etc. to get you started!

Yukon Val:
@Y…please write that essay on Romance! The genre is crying out for exactly the kind of open-minded, un-biased analysis you could bring. You will need to read up, though. I’m sure all of us here at the Crawl would happily donate old copies of The Flame and the Flower, etc. to get you started!

I have to recuse myself. I don’t care for romances, and I’m prejudiced against art idealizing love. Love is just mother nature’s puppet strings.That it feels nice and is useful in a way doesn’t mean its good.

I’ll point you towards this lady:
https://twitter.com/SexyIsntSexist

As an Aspie and a woman she’s much better positioned to offer some unbiased analysis than me.

ScottC -I don’t think you have to have one or the other.

It doesn’t HAVE to be any way. That’s just the way it is at the moment. Honestly? I don’t see a whole lot of contemporary adult (YEAH I SAID IT) SF being a whole lot better. Our gracious host and a few others excepted. I rarely have my mind blown by mad ideas in SF any more, I’m far more likely to find something different but of the same order in literary fiction about human life and experience. Alan Garner’s Boneland was like a howitzer to the head in that regard. (I can’t in conscience claim that as YA, whatever its origins, but it is the most incredible fantasy novel of the century.)

rather than being inoculated with weakened strains of the real thing,

I actually don’t think it works like that, or our reading level would never get beyond The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

If I can read Poe, Mark Twain, HG Wells, Jules Verne, Conan Doyle, Melville, Dickens, Stevenson, Lovecraft, Howard, Bradbury, Clarke, Asimov, Herbert, Heinlein, all by the time I’m 11 or 12, then anyone can. I can barely dress and feed myself.

That’s great and all but it’s really prescriptive passive-aggressive nostalgic humble-bragging, isn’t it? Are we setting arbitrary standards based on individual experiences that may be common in certain groups but are far from universal? Has culture halted at some ideal point where Poe et al have been established as the ideal reading material for 11 to 12 year olds and let the rest flounder as they may? Nope. It never really existed. I’m sure many of your contemporaries were happily devouring Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and still somehow went on to lead rich and fulfilling reading lives.

Because if there were one genre definitely not in need of a YA treatment, it’s fantasy.

One might even go so far as to say that since fantasy has been a staple of children’s fiction since pretty much forever, so much so that it has produced some of the enduring classics of the genre, that, eg, Game Of Thrones, is a YA novel given an adult treatment, not the other way around.

As an adult reader, I’m less impressed by YA that is “Good for a YA book” because it features adult themes.

It may be more useful to see them as human themes. It isn’t as if they’re not relevant to younger readers.

I’m sure those books make a fine story, but no matter how you rationalize it (he frames it as “part adult fiction, part youth novel), he’s now writing away from me as an audience.

Well, I dunno. I try to take each book as it comes, as a piece of work to be judged on its own merits, and the first two books of the trilogy were very well-crafted novels that had a touch more humanity to them than the relentless cyncism of the First Law books, where I admired his dedication to subverting very trope he could get his hands on but was wearily rolling my eyes a bit by the end. Red Country and The Heroes were more like the YA books in that regard – brutal and horrible stuff happened, but there was room for humanity, and the individuals were being ground up by forces other then the demands of trope subversion.

<blockquote<Most seem to be concerned with the effects of coddling teens with low challenge fiction, and the implications for the market and society in general.

Most haven’t read the books they’re denigrating and seem to think that Poe in the cradle was good enough for them so it should be good enough for the coddled youth of today.

One thing that kids *don’t* need protection from is adult prose, characters, and vocabulary.

Dan Brown?Oor, since he was mentioned elsethread, James Patterson? Can we protecte them from the prose characters and vocabulary of Brown and Patterson? The answer is no, we can’t, because that’s not how it works and people will enjoy what they enjoy. But you’re sticking to your assumptions about standards of writing in YA which, I put to you, is no more nor less variable than standards found in general fiction.

fling a copy of the The City & The City (fantasy), along with a Patrick O’Brian novel (historical..read them in my teens) in your general direction.

I love Mieville. Octavian Nothing and Tender Morsels are both better novels than anything Mieville has produced. Patrick O’Brian is a bogus goddamn standard because Patrick O’Brian approaches perfection. (I would never in a fit have given a teenage me an O’Brian novel. I was not ready for them.)

Actually seeking it out as an adult is concept I struggle with, though.

I find it a bit of a puzzle, too. I read it now because that’s my field, and I’ll defend it from all comers, but apart from the occasional breakout, whether it’s in terms of commercial success or literary accolades, I’m slightly amazed that adults commit to it the way they do. Obviously, they get something out of it, and the popular commercial YA stuff really isn’t any better or worse than the popular commercial general fiction, quality wise. Still I was slightly astonished to hear recently that in the US, most YA (forget the percentage) is bought by adults for themselves.

Kurt – Peter, you need to self publish.

Kurt hasn’t seen some of the dumb shit that gets self-published.

ScottC – It’s therefore very difficult to sell a book that doesn’t favor women’s interests, unless you’re an established author with a following.

Or it could appear that way because of pushback against the notion that because women, despite being the bulk of the reading public, will read books aimed men and women but men will only read books aimed at men, publishers are better off aiming more books at men. So more books aimed at women appears like a sudden all-dominating trend rather than a correction.

Y – I’m not a feminist asshole, who wishes nothing more than to jump into a genre that belongs predominantly to the other sex, and demand more stuff they like.

Just an insecure asshole who wants to claim ownership of an entire genre?

That is so naive. Historically, this is one of the most peaceful and prosperous eras, ever.

And yet we still have children living in rubbish mountains and fleeing wars and carrying potable water for miles and miles and required to sing songs praising Dear Leader, as well as increased awareness of these things, increased literacy and increased numbers of books about them.

Dean – I don’t see why any of the Golden Age SF literature couldn’t be read by a young person.

Well there are reasons why they wouldn’t rather than shouldn’t – the main one being that quite a lot of books have been written since and pesky kids might choose to read them instead.

Y – Thus it has the seal of being completely uncool.

Fetishisation of youth right there. The very worst aspects of childishness.

Nigel:Jesus, no wonder you guys (er, this would include me, sort of, by the way) had to make the jump to Golden Age SF etc – those books are fucking dreadful.[…]Even current bestselling lowest-common-denominator YA is such a vast improvement it’s not even funny.

I’m not entirely sure if you’re joking or not, but you’re suggesting that people like Peter and Richard wouldn’t have read better books if only they had access to the Hunger Games–that someone who gravitates to hard sci-fi is as likely to be satisfied with modern YA? You may want to put that one back in the oven a while longer.

As has been pointed out repeatedly, many classics like Poe *were* considered Young Adult reading back then–a far cry from The Hardy Boys ( I don’t think Ive ever even seen a Hardy Boys novel). These were the books gifted to me by my parents. Surely those kinds of books are *almost* as good as Harry Potter, eh?

Besides, it’s not like the last century was hurting for literate YA fiction that is considered classic now. I read Tolkien and T.H. White alongside Bradbury (Bradbury also wrote quality YA–Something Wicked, October Country, etc) and Clarke. This century did not invent that concept. There was plenty of contemporary YA fiction then too that was a good cut above the Hardy Boys. Plenty of coming of age stuff like The Outsiders. If they wanted to read that stuff, it was there.

I tended to skip it, because there weren’t nearly enough robots. Or trashy cold war spy stories. Or creeping horrors. Or snake-cult-fighting barbarians. Or dolphins flying spaceships.

Nigel,

I’ve been reading this thread with some interest, and it seems you misapprehend the nature and purpose of the YA project. You appear to believe the objective is to broaden the minds of readers both as an end in itself, and as preparation for arguably more complex and less approachable fiction, when in fact the creation and expansion of the YA category is, aside from the obvious marketing advantages, about establishing a firmer foundation for peace and freedom. I haven’t read much of the fiction you’ve noted here, but it seems to me given your descriptions that these works actually run counter to the YA project.

Consider, for example, a rumination by our host elsewhere on the crawl about the circumstances of his arrest at the US border some years ago. There was a time when one could safely exit one’s vehicle at the US border and have a discussion with the agents, but times had changed. My understanding of what he wrote is that we grow up with fences, both social and physical which some of us never encounter because we live our lives so far within their perimeters that we don’t even see them. Others of us wander out toward them, and when we’re young, and aware that we may not know where dangers lie, we pay attention so that even though they’re often cloaked, we safely locate and map them. We’re aware of the perimeters and the dangers of transgressing them, and as we age we live within these confines unaware that these barriers are being moved ever inward. Most of us don’t notice because we walk a narrow path. The point is, YA, true YA, makes us subconsciously aware of the tightening of these enclosures.

We want to avoid not just breaches of the peace that crossing these boundaries represents, but any conscious awareness that there even is a peace to be breached. Fiction shaped by marketing categories more generally accepted than yours helps to accomplish this. The people who are truly free are those who adhere closely enough to sanctioned paths that they are never aware of the parameters of this world, and as those parameters are necessarily and rightly tightened we need to work harder to shape consciousness on a continuum from cradle to grave while presenting categories that give the illusion of growth. It’s only in this way that we can truly have peace, and people who, in believing they are free, actually are.

I must add, the underlying anarchism in your posts troubles me and is causing me to think seriously about the wisdom of continuing to read this thread.

Nigel: Just an insecure asshole who wants to claim ownership of an entire genre?

Don’t be daft please. I’m not claiming ‘ownership’ of any genre. You’re projecting. That’s what feminists want to do, with their talk of ‘gamers’ being over. Not hardly over. Barring genetic engineering women are unlikely to ever care much about competitive games. And no one is lamenting or trying to abolish chick games like say, Sims. We simply don’t care that they exist.

ScottC: But they have other significant advantages I didn’t, so I think they’ll be fine. At least until Y proves himself right.

Nigel: Fetishisation of youth right there. The very worst aspects of childishness.

You’re not making any sense at all. In what universe do ya think male teens are going to approve of things that are officially approved by the powers-that-be and shrill, ugly* women?

*well, show me a list of easy-on-the-eyes feminists. It’s quite small. Perhaps because feminist activism is unfeminine, as we all know since those killjoys took saliva samples from feminist activists at a conference. They had high testosterone in comparison, which is likely congenital (I doubt feminists do weight-lifting or similar activities that increase T-levels), and thus they’re more likely to have that masculine look perceived as ugly.

________________________________________

As to YA, one thing I noticed is that a lot of golden age SF is much, much easier reading than present-day offerings. Certain books (I’m looking at you, Echopraxia) seem to delight in being as cryptic and terse and difficult to parse as possible.

Y.: Barring genetic engineering women are unlikely to ever care much about competitive games. And no one is lamenting or trying to abolish chick games like say, Sims.

Wait. What?

And I like the Sims! OK, not really. But I like the idea of the Sims and enjoy other similar games. I wasn’t aware these were “chick games.” I do dislike competitive video games, though. I wasn’t aware I was doing it wrong.
.

Having just reread ACO it’s actually not much of a stretch to call it YA. Well, except for the language, I suppose; you have to have a good command of both English and Russian to really appreciate it. But aside from that it aims more at having… well, fun with a tinge of horror (grotesque enough as to dull the edge). Like real horrorshow. And all that cal.

I mean, I know what hard reading is, and it’s not that (aside, again, from goddamn Russian, but it’s an artificial barrier adding very little value). And more to the point, perhaps it can be something of a formative experience for a teen, but once you’re in your twenties it’s not very likely you’ll learn something from it. Most of what I got from it this time around, being in my thirties, was (mostly) clever juxtaposition of English and Russian words.

So yeah.

Nigel: So you’re not claiming ownership of a genre but you are literally claiming ownership of all competitive games. If you’re competing furiously with yourself, you just lost.

I say that women, as a gender, are not liable to like competitive games, especially the violent ones. Women don’t like violence much either. And they seem much more sensible and less attracted to time-sinks such as competitive computer games. Start playing Rising Storm for example. First 40-60 hours your gaming experience is basically going somewhere and then getting shot by someone invisible lying under a bush 150m away. After that you’ll start have a feel which areas are safe and which aren’t.

I’m not claiming ownership. That’d be like saying women are ‘claiming ownership’ of fruity drinks. Just because they seem to prefer them to beer doesn’t mean a man can’t order one.

Prove me wrong. Show me a paper saying that women like competition and shooter games as much as men.

Nigel: In what universe do lonely, horny, hormonal, poorly-socialised teenage boys think they have the absolute right to dictate the overall tenor and content of any industry or genre to the exclusion of anyone else in a torrent of abuse and threats? Oh yeah, the gaming universe, apparently. Or so they think.

..uh huh. If you want to engage in a circlejerk, go to r/GamerGhazi. And men are not dictating anything – the gaming companies themselves prefer making games that appeal to men, because past experience suggests they tend to buy most of them.

That’s the situation in PC market which I care about. The share of women on Steam is less than 20%. Women also catch shit from both sides apparently. I’ve never seen players harrassing a woman myself, but that might be because of mostly playing with adults and very few teens and the atmosphere was such that any harrassment would likely have resulted in the person being told to STFU or kicked. (as would happen when pushers of cheats would drop in)

Women are also play games seldom.
Maybe they should play more games more often. Since the early 1970’s the gender happiness trends have reversed. Back then, while the patriarchy was still extant and they were oppressed women were happier overall, but now they’re less happy than men. Instead they watch TV more.

ScottC: Wait. What?

And I like the Sims! OK, not really. But I like the idea of the Sims and enjoy other similar games. I wasn’t aware these were “chick games.”I do dislike competitive video games, though. I wasn’t aware I was doing it wrong.

So Intel, well known for being into diversity bullshit has thrown some pittance at the chicks in ESL. Ok. And I don’t see how instituting apartheid for them is supposed to help?

I’ll say women ‘care’ about competitive games when it’s actually common to hear some of them. Games I have played such as Red Orchestra or Rising Storm etc, there’s less than 1-20 women. I’d estimate female players to be maybe 1 in 50. It’s much, much more common to hear a teen male there (who should not be playing the game) than a woman.

Women don’t like these games, and why should they? It’s all guns, sneaking around and very loud sounds. Red Orchestra 2 is particularly known for being unforgiving and unnerving due to all the artillery, shooting, screams of those dying and so on.

Same for CS:GO. Ask actual players how often they play with women. They’ll say it’s very rare. Women seem to prefer RPGs, casual and social games(Farmville and its ilk) and simulations, though only in casual games they are a majority.

____

Also.. you like the Sims? I’d like to hear why, I’ve seen a little about that game but it seems boring and not challenging.

@Y

You know that women engage in competitive games every day, right? Womens sports are a thing that happens. They aren’t nearly as incentivized as men are by cultural norm, market focus, scholarships, male athlete celebrity, and professional opportunity to make a career out of it, but it is something they do. And that’s just the athletic side.

Competitive womens teams in gaming are something that is happening with greater frequency as the culture changes, and women begin to show up in areas of gaming they traditionally haven’t. It just seems awfully early to me to chalk something up to chromosomes when competitive video gaming is in its infancy on a cultural timescale, women’s presence is trending upward, and the gender disparity is so easily explained by any number of other common sense cultural factors.

Think back 50 years ago to how society looked in terms of women’s roles in “male” pastimes. Then 50 years before that. Talk to me in another 50 years. Just kidding. I’ll be dead, but my niece will probably be around to own you at whatever that era’s version of Counterstrike is.
.

Y.: Also.. you like the Sims? I’d like to hear why, I’ve seen a little about that game but it seems boring and not challenging.

Since you asked nicely. To clarify, I said I like the *idea* of the Sims if not that game specifically for aesthetic reasons. I like ant-farm style sim games, and play many of them. Dwarf Fortress, Evil Genius, Dungeon Keeper, Theme-whatever, Sim-whatever. One of the ones I’m most looking forward to is called Maia. It’s only barely playable at present, but features a 70s sci-fi aesthetic, and a lot of great humor.

Why? I’m a highly creative person, and I enjoy games that give me the tools to express that creativity, just like I enjoyed playing with Legos as a kid (wait…are Legos for chicks too???). As far as the challenge, well the challenges tend to be goal oriented things that come about organically, and not structured, linear goals like in your average team death-match game. Besides, not everyone enjoys a game for the same reasons. I skew towards Type 2 myself.
.

Peter Watts: There’s a pretty obvious subtext when you accuse someone of humblebragging for listing Poe and Wells among their childhood reading: come on, you’re just boasting about how much smarter you were than the other kids because you read grown-up books

Wait, who accused me of humblebragging? I didn’t see…oh, Nigel. Since Peter necro’d this, let me just reiterate that I don’t think my experience was universal, but nor do I think that I was in any way *exceptional*. Unlike Dr. Watts, I don’t think it had anything to do with me being particularly intelligent. I don’t consider myself to be, certainly not in comparison with the sort of free roaming lobes that hang out at the ‘Crawl.

My becoming what we would now, sadly, consider an “advanced” reader by modern standards was simply an environment-driven phenomenon. It was an age that pre-dated basic cable (at least for my family), and these were the books that were around (thanks Mom and Dad). I can’t even claim that they would have been the books I would have sought out, as when I finally got my own library card I immediately went after some of the trashiest fare I could find, along side a list of sci-fi that *sounds* impressive by modern standards, but really didn’t strike me as much at the time.

I’ve said more than once here that had I grown up in the internet age, things probably would have been different for me. I really think we need to divorce the concept of intelligence from reading aptitude. Outside of some specific conditions that may impede it, like most everything else it’s simply a proficiency developed by repetition and habit. It’s a habit that happens to pay considerable dividends for the time invested, but not necessarily an irreplaceable one.

All that said, I stated from the first that this is all unavoidably an exercise in middle age chest-thumping to some degree. Dr. Watts was up front with his bit of “get off my lawn” self-deprecation. It doesn’t seem fair to just brush aside these declarations of self-awareness to score a point.
.

come on, you’re just boasting about how much smarter you were than the other kids because you read grown-up books.

Well, I think there kinda is an element of that, inasmuch as people are setting that as the benchmark and then decrying a falling off. And yeah, sure, it was kind of normal. I think it’s pretty normal for today as well, to be honest. Also, as far as I’m aware nobody here has shown that kids today aren’t reading Poe et al so I’m not even sure what the point is, other than to decry the terrible situation where kids today have more reading choices today than they did, and these choices include most of the choices they had. So children’s literature today is in terrible decline? I think you;re more on the mark when decrying some of the business of children’s books, eg:

There’s room for that in adult literature, she was told. There’s no such room in YA.

For the love of Mike, I am reading The Lie Tree by Francis Hardinge which is dark and edgy, beautifully written and deals with – well, Victorian natural science in the throes of scandal and controversy, so far – and it won the Costa Award! What is up with these people? I mean, if they don’t want to represent that sort of book, fine, but to say there’s no room for it in YA is blithering incompetence. A parody of modern YA would be sending up the darkiness and the edginess of it.

ScottC – I don’t think my experience was universal, but nor do I think that I was in any way *exceptional*.

You were doing fairly well for yourself and have every right to be proud of it! And I do appreciate that you have to go by your own experiences, but to reiterate what I’ve said above, in essence what’s changed is that modern young readers have a wider and more varied choice of books aimed at them. And it includes Poe and all the others.

Actually, thinking about it, I read a lot of Poe, too, in assorted anthologies my Mum got for for me. I also remember reading The Horla and The Yellow Wallpaper and The Monkey’s Fist all in a book I got with my Confirmation money… now I’m doing it… But anyway, these have been perennial reading for kids/teens for a long time now, and that hasn’t really changed. (I can’t really speak for Asimov, Howard and Lovecraft, though, but they’re not difficult to find at any rate.)

ScottC: Yeah. Wouldn’t it be far easier to make a list of mainstream female celebrities who *don’t* identify as “feminists” these days? I’d wager many women movie stars would qualify even for Y’s lofty standards of physical attractiveness.

Oh yeah, those. I meant people with a clue. You know, those writing all those tedious essay and engaging in all that activism. Fellow travelers who’d just as easily be communist/fascist/monarchist etc depending on the zeitgeist don’t count.

ScottC: Since you asked nicely. To clarify, I said I like the *idea* of the Sims if not that game specifically for aesthetic reasons. I like ant-farm style sim games, and play many of them. Dwarf Fortress, Evil Genius, Dungeon Keeper, Theme-whatever, Sim-whatever. One of the ones I’m most looking forward to is called Maia. It’s only barely playable at present, but features a 70s sci-fi aesthetic, and a lot of great humor

Oh, those games. I like them too. But Sims doesn’t involve horrific torture for monetary gain like Dwarf Fortress (never played it, though I would if they ever got off their arse and put some decent-ish graphics into it..). Dungeon Keeper is one of most fun games ever..

Peter Watts: There’s also the issue of self-definition, of what a “feminist” even is. If you define a feminist as someone who recognizes that biases against women are systemically embedded in a variety of social structures, and that they should be dismantled, I

LOLWUT.

If it were just social structures.
Aren’t you supposed to be a biologist?

Look here what one Canadian has written in regards to non-black women. Their biology makes them give in to men, especially after puberty and before late middle age. (Black women don’t, because of more independent relationships, thus the stereotype)-

http://www.unz.com/pfrost/the-adaptive-value-of-aw-shucks/

Re: Y, on biology

At this point the main difference between the social and the biological is that we have a pretty decent and gradually improving idea as to how to fix the biological.

So I guess the takeaway is “hope you’re right, since if you are, I’m just gonna medicate and/or CRISPR-Cas the “self esteem gap” (and attendant phenomena) away”.

03: So I guess the takeaway is “hope you’re right, since if you are, I’m just gonna medicate and/or CRISPR-Cas the “self esteem gap” (and attendant phenomena) away”.

Sure. Do you speak Mandarin and are you willing to acknowledge the supreme authority of the CCP?

No one else is gonna do any Crispring on humans. Not before this all comes burning down.

A Message About Messages, by Ursula K. Le Guin:
http://www.ursulakleguin.com/MessageAboutMessages.html