Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (179 page)

The last time I saw her she was wrapped in a flame-red cloak from the looms of Rigel and wore a fortune in Jovan rubies blazing on her wrists. Cliff was flipping a three-figure credit bill to a waiter. And Bat had a row of Vernal juice glasses set up before him. Just a little family party out on the town.

* * * *

Copyright © 1953 by Andre Norton.

Science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon once offered an appealing definition of science fiction: “[A] good science-fiction story is a story about human beings, with a human problem, and a human solution, that would not have happened at all without its science content” (qtd. in McGregor 225). Sturgeon’s insistence on “human” problems and solutions complements how publishers and educators think about science fiction written for young adults: Not only must the science be accessible, but as Joe Sutliff Sanders notes, the structure and themes of YA SF must be “relevant to the young adults of its period” which could mean emphasizing coming of age plots (442). Yet the “science content” is also necessary. Of relevance to adolescent cognitive development is SF’s combination of
explaining
worlds changed by scientific development with
immersing
readers in them, thus challenging readers to discover the logic of the unfamiliar setting (compare Sanders with Mendlesohn,
Inter-Galactic
).

Young adult science fiction, or YA SF for short, refers to science fiction written and published for readers of about thirteen years old and up. From the nineteenth century and continuing at least through the 1950s, the assumed reader was defined by gender as well as age: Boys were the main target audience. Many girls still discovered science fiction, and in recent decades authors have made the genre much more welcoming to female readers. Why should adult readers of SF care about SF written for adolescents? While it can be fun to study the history of any field that one likes, here the rewards include finding more good science fiction to read and enjoy.

Some Highlights of the History of YA SF

Since the nineteenth into the twentieth century teens have read science fiction by Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and in series works aimed at youth readership. According to the
Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English
, two works popular with youth in the early twentieth century were Wells’s
The Time Machine
(1895) and
War of the Worlds
(1898) (Watson 633); these two still influence YA SF in the twenty-first century. Also available starting in the late nineteenth century were series featuring “science adventure stories” (Molson and Miles 394) with boy inventors often their protagonists. These series include the
Frank Reade
and
Frank Reade, junior
stories; the
Great Marvel
books; and the first
Tom Swift
series. Such stories dramatized “both realistic and futuristic applications of science” while offering readers wonderfully competent protagonists with whom to identify (Molson “American…” 19).

The 1950s mark a new era. Scholars and fans agree that Robert A. Heinlein’s science fiction novels written for “juveniles” (as young adult readers used to be termed) are milestones because of their high quality as science fiction; their enduring market success; and their success in persuading the children’s literature community (teachers, librarians, publishers) that science fiction can be an educational and positive reading experience for young adults. Beginning with Rocket Ship Galileo in 1947 and ending with Have Space Suit—Will Travel in 1958, Heinlein published twelve novels with Charles Scribner’s Sons. C.W. Sullivan explains that Heinlein “reinvented” series science fiction with such innovations as presenting “new main characters and settings” in each book and incorporating an overall story arc for the series that echoes American history (“Robert A. Heinlein” 68). Sullivan emphasizes that Heinlein portrays aliens freshly and creates female characters “unusual for science fiction of that time” (68). For contemporary readers, Heinlein’s Scribner novels mix 1950s gender roles with characters that challenge them. Thus Citizen of the Galaxy has a woman anthropologist, Red Planet has a girl who is a better shot than her brother, and Have Space Suit—Will Travel features a brilliant, courageous female sidekick who saves the life of the male protagonist. Twenty-first century readers may also be challenged by Heinlein’s optimism over humanity’s mission to conquer space, or by the sometimes ruthless attitudes expressed. Yet, even when characters make categorical statements about, for example, what kind of people are truly fit to survive (chapter seven, Have Space Suit—Will Travel), these novels have an open attitude and a subsequent chapter that invites readers to keep thinking.

Heinlein insisted on never writing down to teens; in fact, he declared they were more open than adults to difficult concepts and strange vocabulary (Franklin 74). When Heinlein elaborated in a draft of
Red Planet
on the procreation of the Martians, his Scribner editor objected that it would be deemed inappropriate for the target audience. Such conflicts spurred Heinlein’s thinking about science fiction. In a “grumbling” letter to his agent he contrasted an outdated definition of the genre with where it could go:

“Science fiction … consists of stories about the wonderful machines of the future.” [This] definition is all right as far as it goes, but it … includes only that portion [of the field]… which has been heavily overworked .… Speculative fiction (I prefer that term to science fiction) is also concerned with sociology, psychology, esoteric aspects of biology, impact of terrestrial culture on the other cultures we may encounter when we conquer space, etc., without end. (
Grumbles
49)

Heinlein’s second YA novel,
Space Cadet
(1948), shapes adventures by such topics while positing a Space Academy grounded in speculation of how earth might avoid nuclear warfare in an impartial (and frightening) way.
Space Cadet
loosely inspired other YA SF like Carey Rockwell’s
Tom Corbett: Space Cadet
books and the U.S. television series of the same name which ran from 1950–55. Heinlein’s dramatizing of school traditions and dangerous studies may have helped to inspire YA fantasy’s school for wizards stories, beginning with Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books and culminating in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series.

Heinlein was soon joined by other talented writers, notably Andre Norton (pseudonym of Alice Mary Norton, 1912–2005) who wrote a variety of YA SF and fantasy series, including
Star Ka’at
, featuring catlike aliens and coauthored with Dorothy Madlee. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America created an award honoring Norton’s remarkable career: the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy. I have fond memories of Norton’s
Beastmaster
, featuring the Dineh (Navajo) hero, Hosteen Storm, who works with mutated animals on a far planet. In works like
Star Man’s Son 2250 A.D
., Norton skillfully combines young adult themes like rebellion with science fictional elements like mutation resulting from nuclear war. The science fiction elements serve both as causes for alienation and as “assets” in hostile new environments (Sullivan “Introduction” 2). In her recent book on YA SF, Farah Mendlesohn discusses Norton with Heinlein and presents the two as exemplary of the best in the genre. Mendlesohn includes an impressive list of themes shared by Heinlein’s and Norton’s novels, including: “navigation,…constitution- making,…migration conflicts, religion, scientific thinking, planetary exploration, [and] the politics of colonization” (
Inter-Galactic
16).

The 1960s through the 1980s show writers winning awards while fashioning distinctive blends of young adult stories of conflict and growth with science fictional themes. Alan Nourse’s novels combining suspense with speculation about future medicine (as in The Mercy Men, 1968) are highly regarded. In the 1970s Anne McCaffrey added YA volumes to her Pern world, beginning with Dragonsong (1976), a “sensitive and somewhat unconventional” girl’s coming of age (Molson and Miles 433). John Christopher’s popular Tripod trilogy begins with The White Mountains (1967) and its “convincing and troubling” depiction of England after an alien invasion (Molson and Miles 412). One of Peter Dickinson’s outstanding works is Eva (1989 Boston Globe Horn Book winner), a novel called “emotionally shocking and intellectually provocative” in its working out of hybrid human and chimpanzee personhood for a 13-year-old girl whose memory is salvaged after a car accident (Barron 185). Monica Hughes received the Canadian Council Children’s Literature Prize for The Guardian of Isis (1982). Also deserving particular mention is author H. M. Hoover. One of her novels about planetary colonization, Another Heaven, Another Earth (1981), shows a scientific and cultural adventurousness comparable to Heinlein but distinctive in Hoover’s combination of suspense and pathos. In Australian YA SF, the 1980s show authors such as Gillian Rubinstein and John Marsden receiving critical acclaim by having their works shortlisted for Children’s Book of the Year (Foster 90–94).

Madeleine L’Engle’s classic
A Wrinkle in Time (1963 Newbery winner; first novel in L’Engle’s Time Trilogy) blends “science and mythology, fantasy and realism, philosophy and radical theology” with a “nontraditional female hero” (Smedman 66). The mysterious characters Mrs. Who, Mrs. What, and Mrs. Which communicate through quotations with humans, and thus L’Engle includes her take on a practice Heinlein employed: incorporating references that challenge readers to participate in cultural history (see Erisman; also Sullivan, “Robert A. Heinlein”). Another of L’Engle’s themes involves children possessing special sensory abilities which may be an evolutionary potential for humans. Two other authors who explore the “special children” motif are William Sleator, in The Green Futures of Tycho, and Virginia Hamilton in her Justice Cycle novels, which are the first African-American authored YA SF series about African-American characters (Sand and Frank 99 n.4). Sleator has written many intriguing novels. The Green Futures of Tycho (1981) dares readers to sort out multiplying futures and ethical dilemmas when Tycho’s use of an alien-made time travel device is complicated by his sibling rivalries and the apparent agenda of the device. Hamilton’s Justice and Her Brothers (1978) also exemplifies the cognitive work-as-play that YA SF can offer. With thematic resemblance to adult SF like More Than Human (by Theodore Sturgeon; 1953), the novel unfolds the telepathic powers emerging in several teens in a rural community. Partial explanations linked to genetics come late, and most often Justice’s expanding “power of observing and knowing through the senses” (Hamilton 209) is suggestively shown.

Bioengineering themes are prominent in the YA SF of the 1990s and into the current century. Such stories often depict a science-fictionally warped coming of age in a near-future Earth. A thoughtful treatment of cloning, combined with a dystopian vision of a future Mexico and U.S. in light of the drug wars is found in Nancy Farmer’s
The House of the Scorpion
(2002). Stories that approach biotechnological themes with an eye for positive as well as disturbing potential include Margaret Peterson Haddix’s
Turnabout
(2000), Ann Halam’s
Dr. Franklin’s Island
(2002), and Mary E. Pearson’s
The Adoration of Jenna Fox
(2008)—whose topical interest includes the complex distribution of health care in a near future and identity questions in relation to medical advances. Other YA SF of the 1990s, such as Charles Sheffield’s
Jupiter
series, take protagonists back into space, and are thus reminiscent of Heinlein and Norton.

As witnessed by Suzanne Collins’s impressive
Hunger Games
trilogy, dystopian novels remain a popular venue in YA SF. In
Daz 4 Zoe
, Robert Zwindells “introduced many new readers to the…political and social implications [of the futuristic dystopia]” (Watson 635). Lois Lowry’s
The Giver
(Newbery Winner 1994) echoes Aldus Huxley’s
Brave New World
as its society keeps its citizens emotionally children and ignorant of history. An adventurous dystopia is
Mortal Engines
(2001) by Philip Reeve with its far future post holocaust setting where predatory mobile cities are driven ideologically by “municipal Darwinism.” M. T. Anderson’s Feed (2002) extrapolates an internet implanted at birth in the brains of people who can afford it, exacerbating the ills of consumerist North America. The darkly satirical Feed harks back to Wells in its closing sections, when a character urges the protagonist to read The Time Machine. But not all science fictional satires for young adults are grim dystopias. A recent class at the university where I teach loved Anderson’s novel but saved their highest praise in terms of enjoyment for The True Meaning of Smekday, written and illustrated by Adam Rex, and a nominee for the 2007 Andre Norton Award for YA SF and Fantasy. In a road-trip involving two alien invasions, cloning, and lots more, Rex uses science fictional themes to satirize the history of colonization as well as our media-saturated culture.

In the late 1990s J. K. Rowling’s
Harry Potter
series spectacularly renewed readers’ and publishers’ interest in genre fiction for young adults. Although science fiction texts targeting YA readers are not as numerous as fantasy, good science fiction written for ages thirteen and up is found readily in libraries and book stores. And whereas YA SF used to be shelved in bookstores with adult SF because sellers understood that teens preferred it that way (Sand and Frank 103), the situation is more varied now with, for example, Heinlein’s juveniles probably still shelved with general SF and authors like M. T. Anderson and Nancy Farmer grouped with young adult fiction. This dual shelving scenario parallels one conversation among passionate readers of YA SF. Mendlesohn questions whether a story can be full science fiction if it focuses on teen issues of an inward perspective, resulting in a smaller conceptual horizon than science fiction can offer (“Is There…”). In contrast, Michael Levy shows that recent dystopian YA SF yields the classic potential of science fiction to make the familiar strange through its portrayal of future versions of contemporary teen realities (“Sublimation”). As you form your own views, you’ll find many texts in this genre enjoyable and thought provoking reading.