A new demographic study conducted by Chinese researchers reveals that China has 32.7 million more males than females under the age of 20. Of course, some regions have higher male to female ratios than others, partly due to differences in how China's "one child" policy is enforced. In many regions, couples who give birth to a girl are allowed to have a second child, and tend to abort fetuses until they have a male. In urban areas like Shanghai with more education and greater social parity between the sexes, people are allowed only one child no matter what the sex. While there are still more boys born, the ratio is less extreme. You can see a breakdown of China's demographics by region below.

The study included over 4 million participants from across China, and was based on data gathered during the 2005 year. The Chinese government has expressed concern over the looming population imbalance among young adults, which is going to become more extreme over the next ten years or so. Most experts agree that the imbalance has largely been caused by access to ultrasound tests that can determine the sex of a baby before birth. (It's worth noting that China's current population control policies were implemented before the availability of these tests.) Though sex-based abortion is illegal in China, it is widely practiced.

So the male generation coming of age now in China is mainly the result of population control policies that didn't take into account changes in technology.

All kinds of solutions have been proposed, though of course it's too late to stop the ball rolling on demographic changes that have already happened to people who are teens and toddlers right now. When the male generation comes of age, there will not be enough fertile women to replace the current population and it will decline.

Some commentators have suggested that China gradually relax its population control policies, allowing people to create families of any size they like within the next ten years. Others believe that there needs to be a tweak in the policies of regions that allow a second child only if the first is female - these are the regions that have the highest male-to-female sex ratios. And there have already been efforts made to educate citizens about the value of girls via the fairly successful "Care for Girls" campaign that has halted the runaway ratios in targeted regions.

The pressing question now, however, is what will happen to this male generation? Ian McDonald asks this same question about India in his short story "An Eligible Boy," published in his new anthology Cyberabad Days. He imagines a world where the lack of women has broken down the caste system: Women are so valuable that men compete for women of every caste. They spend all their cash on dressing up, paying exorbitant amounts to matchmaking services, and trying vainly to interest the few women who remain single. The disappointed bachelors turn to videogames, soaps, and marriage-like relationships with other men.

Margaret Atwood asks this same question in her novel The Handmaid's Tale, which imagines a post-apocalyptic future where only a few women are fertile. Those who are fertile are rounded up and turned into breeding slaves for wealthy men. Essentially, every powerful male gets to have a harem that includes his (infertile) wife and a "handmaid," his breeding woman.

While both of these scenarios are extreme, the question of what will happen to both sexes in the male generation is pressing. Will men have to take on the traditionally female role of hoping to be noticed by the opposite sex, wishing for that lucky moment when women choose them? Or will men treat women like valuable but powerless objects, best when they are kept locked up and constantly pregnant? Or perhaps there will be a social transformation where women get to have male harems so that those extra 32.7 million men all get to have wives. No matter what happens, the next two decades in China are likely to foment a strange new kind of sexual revolution.

Read the full report on China's sex demographics here (it's a PDF). Or read a summary in the New York Times.

It's been 20 years since Bruce Sterling compared the "mainstream" of science fiction to a fossilizing Politburo. Since that time, the situation has only gotten more dire. People are constantly remarking on the graying of science fiction readership, but statistics seem to be hard to come by. Here's Tor's Patrick Nielsen Hayden talking about the fact that almost no people born in the 1970s or later have won Hugos or Nebulas. (And in the comments on that post, there's lots of assertion that WorldCon's attendees were skewed towards an older demographic, but no hard numbers that I can see.) Here's an amusing essay from the New York Review of Science Fiction analyzing an issue of Asimov's where every single story is by an older writer and is about getting old.

Meanwhile, young-adult science fiction is exploding. According to John Scalzi, the top 50 young adult science fiction/fantasy bestsellers sold twice as many books as the top 100 adult science fiction/fantasy bestsellers. As we mentioned before, there have been hardcore post-apocalyptic novels for kids and young adults for decades. With more on the way. And with City Of Ember finally being adapted to a (hopefully) major movie, more YA readers than ever will be looking for similar stories.

It's great news that young people are getting exposed to SF at an impressionable age, without apparently feeling any particular stigma about it. And yes, a lot of those people will eventually come to view SF as "kid stuff" and stop reading when they reach adulthood. But if even 20 percent of those readers keep reading SF after they turn 18, that guarantees a sizeable readership for SF in decades to come.

The other great thing about YA science fiction is that people come to writing it from all sorts of angles. Some YA authors write non-speculative YA books and then drift into writing books with science-fictional plots. Some "real" SF writers, like Cory Doctorow (and Scalzi, whose new book Zoe's Tale is being marketed to both adults and teens), try their hands at YA fiction. And then there are "literary" writers, who would never dream of trying to write a grown-up SF book, who find themselves writing for the YA market. I was having lunch with a literary author, an MFA who teaches creative writing and writes for journals like Ploughshares, and she was telling me her agent had told her the big New York publishers were looking for YA books with scifi or fantasy elements, and she was trying her hand at one. Dale Peck, who's now co-writing a science fiction novel with Heroes creator Tim Kring, started in speculative fiction by writing the scifi/fantasy blend Drift House series, about time-travel and a tapestry that shows the future.

Meanwhile, "science fiction" as a publishing niche refers to a segment of books that appeal to a particular segment of people. Call it "nerd lit." You don't have to be a geek to read science fiction - just like you can dress in Banana Republic and listen to Death Metal or Goth/Industrial music. It just helps. You're more likely to find your fellow Vernor Vinge enthusiasts at a gathering of sysadmins than at a dressage meet, or a stockbrokers' convention. Science fiction is stories written by geeks for geeks. (I'm a nerd myself, so I'm not being obnoxious here.) Your average SF novel nowadays assumes you belong to that culture from the outset, and you're used to a whole range of concepts and stylistic tics that might put off other readers.

Luckily, we can have both grown-up science fiction and the YA version. But to the extent that one is shrinking and the other one is growing, that may not be entirely a bad thing. Look at it this way: is it better to have SF written for a subculture, or anybody of a certain age?

The readership of "regular" science fiction books is a defined group of people with a shared set of interests, who dress a particular way and talk in a "nerd accent." The readership of YA books is anyone of a particular age. So, in a sense, YA books have a more diverse readership and are more welcoming to outsiders. Grown-ups might feel silly reading a Scott Westerfeld book on the subway, but there's really nothing to stop you doing it anyway.

Bottom line: We're lucky to have both YA literature with science-fictional themes and "regular" science fiction. There's no reason we can't have both, and appreciate both for what they are, including the innovation and breadth of concepts that mature science fiction can explore. But we should especially celebrate the awesome potential of YA SF to revitalize the field, and bring new readers to SF concepts.

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