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.

Entry-level SF

Yesterday I was reading a discussion about entry-level SF.  It was a long discussion, with many different viewpoints, all of them recommending their best books to hook people into reading SF.

SF has an image problem.  It always has had, but for me as a woman SF writer wanting to write about the world from a feminist perspective it's even more of a problem.

So what would I recommend as entry-level SF for women readers?  Sadly, nothing that I've seen recently on my local bookshop's shelves. That's a problem in itself, as the bookseller clearly believes SF is for men and doesn't stock most of the new books by women authors.  The few that do make it onto the shelves are military SF.  Not a great introduction to the genre for women.

No, if you want entry-level SF go look in the young adult section. It isn't marketed as SF, but one look at the covers and blurbs of many of the books will tell you that they most definitely are.  And just as importantly, many of these books tackle soft SF issues wrapped around the hard SF core of the story. Most of the exciting new SF I've read for the last decade has been YA.

Take Scoff Westerfield's Uglies/Pretties/Specials trilogy, exploring the consequences of extreme re-making of our bodies.  Everybody ends up Pretty, but there's a price to pay, a price that keeps people controlled and docile.  If you want a warning about what cosmetic surgery could become, read them.

Then there's Sam Hawksmoor's The Repossession and The Hunting.  Teleportation experiments on vulnerable kids, anyone?  Or how about Sarah Crossan's Breathe, taking the old joke about taxing the air we breathe and showing what happens when we do.

Memory wipe?  Try Teri Terry's Slated and Fractured.  An exploration of not belonging and its consequences?  Try Veronica Roth's Divergent.

Mobile cities?  Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines series, with their terrifying cyborg Stalkers.

All these books deal with hard SF issues, but they also explore the soft SF cultural and individual consequences for people of the worlds they've drawn. And just as importantly, they all tella damn good story, something a lot of adult SF has got too up itself to do.  But that's another rant for another day.