Why I love YA SF

One of the reasons I haven't been drawn to adult SF for a while is because my local bookshop is stuffed full of traditional white male SF space opera.  The few female SF authors they deign to stock are writing about prostitutes or kick-ass heroines, neither of which I can empathise with.

The issues I want to read about are more likely to turn up in YA SF these days.  There are some things in the genre I can't identify with, like going to school, which is thankfully far in my last.  I also can't be doing with first love stories.  But beyond these issues YA SF stories present us with important issues and questions.

Scott Westerfeld's Uglies/Pretties/Specials books show us what might happen if we don't change our obsession with beauty and the perfect body.  Sarah Crossan's Breathe is a cautionary environmental tale about what happens when you kill off all the trees.

Teri Terry's Slated gives us a nightmare world of a totalitarian state and mind-wiped children,  Sam Hawksmoor's The Repossession and The Hunting show us what happens when ruthless corporations are left alone to experiment on vulnerable children.

The worlds these authors create are genuinely chilling, all the more so because most of them are near future SF, rooted in developments that are going on in our present societies right now.  

But I think the real reason I loveYA SF so much is because the ideas and messages in the books are wrapped up within a damn good story with a beginning, middle, and end, and twists and turns that keep us gasping and guessing.

If adult SF wants to appeal to a wider audience it would do well to learn from YA SF.  Ordinary people are forced into becoming extraordinary, and there are lots of strong feminist heroines saving the world. It's time we saw more of that in adult SF.