Nebula Awards Showcase 2009 (41 page)

H
arry Potter.

Many people would say that the explosive growth in young adult science fiction and fantasy can be summed up and attributed in total to the unprecedented popularity of J. K. Rowling’s series about the boy wizard. They wouldn’t be entirely wrong. The truth is that Rowling’s novels did push open the doors to the category, and that new YA readers entered by the millions.

It’s that simple, but it’s also more complex. Science fiction and fantasy—in particular, fantasy—have always appealed to teen readers. Since the genre’s inception, many of its finest writers have chosen to write for children and young adults, at least on occasion. Writers like Andre Norton, Jane Yolen, Diana Wynne Jones, Robert Heinlein, and Joan Aiken are cases in point. Not to mention the fact that many seminal works like Ray Bradbury’s
Fahrenheit 451
and Kurt Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse Five
are regularly read by teens to this day. Even if the books aren’t strictly speaking YA, they definitely fit YA and children’s editor Sharyn November’s definition of the term as “what teens read.” And, as demonstrated by November’s own Firebird imprint, SF/F novels originally written for and marketed to adults by writers like Charles de Lint and Emma Bull have equal appeal when repackaged for teen audiences.

The continual moaning about the state of the SF/F field has become all too familiar—the conventional wisdom says that it’s stagnant, that readers aren’t connecting or buying, that the audience may be dying out. Many of the same issues plague mainstream literary fiction. Yet what rarely gets talked about in these conversations is that the YA and children’s segment of publishing is indisputably thriving. The Children’s Book Council’s sales survey estimates that YA sales alone have increased 25 percent in recent years. Ask any children’s librarian, literature expert, or advocate and they will tell you that SF/F is the most popular type of book with young readers. That demand coupled with increasing sales has created a robust, competitive scene where young readers demand strong voices and satisfying stories.

Within the SF/F field as a whole, there are recent signs that YA fiction may finally lose its status as the younger sibling who might make good someday. SFWA’s creation of the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy in 2005 certainly points in the direction of increasing credibility and recognition of the quality of the work being produced for younger readers. This year’s Norton Award winner was none other than Rowling, the woman who kicked open the door, for
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
, the final installment in her blockbuster series. Hers may have been the most famous name among the slate of nominees, but that’s hardly surprising given that four of the six remaining contenders were up for debut novels—Ysabeau Wilce, Steve Berman, Sarah Beth Durst, and Adam Rex. The remaining two nominees were Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, for her second novel, and veteran SF writer Elizabeth Wein, for her fourth.

Some of these names are new to the genre and some aren’t, but the list is remarkable for the range of new talent it showcases. Name another literary award that gives a similar number of newcomers a place at the table (that isn’t expressly designated
for
newcomers). Just as remarkable as the number of fresh faces is the freshness of the books in question. Durst’s mostly lighthearted riff on classic fairy tales could never be mistaken for Wilce’s coming-of-age story embroidered with wildly ornate world-building. Yes, Rowling has been a unique attractor, bringing attention and readers, but this was a segment of the field ready to expand its borders. The result has been a true golden age of YA fiction in general, and of YA science fiction and fantasy in particular.

Part of the success and freedom many authors are finding comes from YA science fiction and fantasy’s dual status as part of the mainstream and a ghetto. Children’s and YA publishers typically don’t segment their offerings by genre, and SF/F is a highly regarded part of children’s tradition. There is no automatic stigma attached by bastions of literary snobbery to works of SF/F; instead, fantastical works are considered as literary as any other type of fiction. The majority of stigma experienced by those working for younger readers comes from those younger sibling perspectives—children’s literature, YA included, is still often ghettoized by those outside its ranks in adult markets, because it is for younger readers and perceived as less complex than work for adults. This coexistence enables writers of YA SF/F to enjoy, literally, the best of both worlds—being respected by one’s peers, but largely free from the prying eyes of judgmental outsiders. (SF/F for young adults has escaped much of the hand-wringing over content that chick lit and other parts of the YA scene have come in for—so far.) From this unique set of conditions has come outstanding, inventive work at both short story (Kij Johnson’s novelette included in this volume) and novel length (Holly Black’s
Valiant
, the first Andre Norton winner).

The children’s and YA field also comes with inherent gate-keepers that are vocal about bringing attention to books. Librarians and teachers champion the best books they encounter, and are able to translate that into real readers and increased sales through prestigious awards like the American Library Association’s Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature (which recognized three novels with fantastical elements in 2007, including the winner) and lists such as the Best Books for Young Adults. Likewise, these advocates draw attention to the books they see the target audience responding to. What this means is that works deserving of more attention often get it. The underlying shape of the children’s and YA field fosters innovation through such recognition, and teens are buying in big time.

Debates rage about whether these new young readers of SF/F will someday translate into an increase in adult genre readers. But maybe that isn’t where the focus should be. Perhaps this is a case where the older sibling can learn from the younger one, and be strengthened by the relationship. Why are readers—both teens and adults—responding so strongly to YA at the moment? That is a question it would serve us well to keep asking. My hope is that the excellent YA work being produced today continues to not only find young readers, but inspire future writers to press the larger field’s boundaries further.

I
edited the Science Fiction Book Club for thirty-four years—a figure that surprises even me—so Ellen Datlow thought it might be interesting if I wrote something about my experience.

I considered taking a look at how online stores have changed the bookselling world, but the result was pretty boring. So I added a few notes about my life as editor of the club—first as a very junior editor in the Doubleday Book Clubs scheme of things, eventually rising to the eminence of editor-in-chief (and, unlike the editors-in-chief of some of the other clubs, I actually had another editor reporting to me; corporate life is grand). And the notes metastasized. 062-39333_ch01_4P.indd 301 ½3/09 1:19:41 AM

It was, in almost every way, a dream job. In my early years, long before the German publishing giant Bertelsmann arrived in our lives, the SFBC was part of Doubleday—just one sucker on the book club arm of the Doubleday octopus. It was a specialty club and therefore more lowly in the corporate mind than the big general-interest clubs (the Literary Guild and the Doubleday Book Club, if you care) or even than a club like Mystery Guild that catered to a big, popular special interest. But—and here’s the beauty part—
no one else in the division knew anything about science fiction. Or wanted to.
They simply heaved a sigh of relief that they’d found someone who knew the field and didn’t actually have two heads, and they left me alone. I could buy whatever I wanted, I could feature whichever books I wanted in the catalogue—I could even set the pricing, which is something that the marketers for most of the other clubs held on to like mongooses clinging to cobras. No one ever questioned anything, or, if they did, it was timidly and apologetically.

This idyllic situation couldn’t last indefinitely, of course, but I had a good long run for some fifteen years. Then two things happened: the market for SF (and therefore the potential profits) got a lot larger, and the whole book club business became bigger and more complex, especially after Bertelsmann bought Doubleday and spun the clubs off into their own separate corporation. Computers also made a difference; they made practicable a degree of both organization and oversight that wouldn’t have been worth the cost in time and energy when everything was done more or less manually.

And it
was
done manually for longer than you might think—computerization came slowly to the Doubleday clubs. Back in 1986 when Bertelsmann bought us, we had a computer—a big mainframe that lived in, I think, Indianapolis. It could do a few things. But most of our records were on six-by-eight-inch cards kept—in ink—by nice ladies of a certain age. Bertelsmann was horrified—why, when their shiny new company had a shiny reasonably new computer, were we still using index cards? So they laid off the nice ladies and discontinued the file cards—and then discovered, to their even greater horror, that they had, in effect, fired the computer. It took about three years to assemble enough new data to know what we were doing. The moral is, I guess, make sure you really know what you’re doing before you empty the trash.

Anyway, marketing and financial departments began to play a bigger and bigger role in the SFBC’s daily life. We were blessed, though, in almost always getting excellent people—people who did their jobs well and didn’t try to do mine (I’m afraid I wasn’t so restrained; I never did manage to get my fingers out of the pricing sandbox, and many lively conversations were the result). In fact, I tended to be rather grateful to them, since they did the highly statistical jobs I didn’t want to do and wouldn’t have been very good at. In the same way, I was grateful to my bosses, who dealt with senior management with a tact I probably couldn’t have mustered, at least not when I was really worked up about some piece of corporate stupidity. And since that corporate stupidity was, in fact, sometimes corporate intelligence—I hate to admit it, but I
can
be wrong—it’s just as well that there were intermediaries.

And I had lots of other help: the long-suffering editors I worked with who compensated for my blind spots, the copywriters and art directors who created both the catalogues we mailed and the jackets for our exclusive editions, the production people who made sure we had actual books to put in the mail. They were uniformly wonderful, and I thank them from the bottom of my heart.

The trends of more and more oversight and more and more bureaucratic complexity have continued unto the present. It’s unavoidable given the size of the business and the nature of today’s commercial world. Even at the end, I could get away with doing things my way even if it wasn’t how everyone else did them, simply because I’d been editing the club successfully for so very long and knew it so well. Also, when moved to wrath, I bite. My successor (a talented SF enthusiast named Rome Quezada) lacks those advantages. On the other hand, he has a degree of excitement and enthusiasm which, I have to admit, I was losing. I still loved the job, but thirty-four years (and three months and twenty-four days) is a long time, and it’s probably for the best that the club has new eyes and a new mind to bring it into the future.