Action adventure - or SF?

Sometimes the labels publishers put on our books aren't helpful.  For adults, SF has to have a recogniseable SF cover, and there's something about an adult book that seems to need it laden with tech.

That's why I love YA SF so much. The writing style is unpretentious. Kids won't stick around to fathom out who's talking if they're confused.  So there's none of that getting half-way through a book with two first person viewpoints and still not knowing who's talking that I've encountered in adult books.  Putting it bluntly, adult SF is often up itself.  It tries too hard. YA doesn't label itself as SF.  It just puts the stories out there, often dressed up as action-adventure,

Perhaps this is the burden of the genre label, which drives publishers to be sure they're putting out 'worthy' books with lots of shiny toys in them.  But story is driven by people, and what we remember is the people, not the dozens of bits of tech, which are often incidental anyway.

YA books tell the story in a straightforward way.  Here is the situation, here's what the characters do about it.  Straightforward doesn't mean simple, nor does it mean lacking emotional depth.  One of the things I've been most surprised by in some of the recent books I've read is the amount of emotional processing and receiving of insights the young adult characters are doing.

This rarely happens in adult books.  We don't explore the consequences of being ripped away from our parents at an early age.  Nor do we explore our characters' reactions to finding out their parents aren't who they thought they were.  We expect our adult SF characters to go through their world as if emotions and their back history weren't relevant to their lives.  I think some SF writers are afraid to put  this emotional involvement into their books.  It's not what adult SF writers do.

Meanwhile I will continue to enjoy thinking about the morals of mind-wiping people, the commercialisation of the air supply, and the control one has over people through making a beauty standard absolute, as seen through the eyes of YA characters.