Robin Wasserman, author of the terrific robot-body novel Skinned (which has a similar storyline to Caprica) will join Libba Bray, bestselling author of A Great And Terrible Beauty and the new "transdimensional mad-cow road trip" novel Going Bovine. Also attending will be debut fantasy author Carline McCullough. They're all YA authors, but they're aiming the event at adults who have questions about the rising genre.

The event details are on Facebook, and here's the blurb:

Sex, Drugs, and Vampires — Everything You Secretly Wanted to Know About YA But Were Afraid to Ask
Once upon a time, YA fiction involved after-school special moralizing, teens worried about their split ends, and feel-good babysitting clubs. Now, it's a brave new world that reflects our modern anxieties—war, self-harm, drugs, sex, identity, gender, existentialism and more—with no-holds barred honesty (and occasional supernatural creatures). Join YA authors Robin Wasserman, Carolyn MacCullough, and Libba Bray as they discuss the new landscape of young adult fiction, from what makes a book YA to getting published to book banning and beyond.

"And some of the things I see now, particularly in science fiction juveniles, are of a different character. And part of that I think is because the authors writing them are not trained in the sciences, they're trained in the humanities. And they are looking back at the legacy of what science is doing, has done, on everything from environmental issues to questions of weaponry and warfare, and they're sort of taking stock of this, and I wouldn't say necessarily that it's all pessimism, but you don't see the same sense of wonder balanced in the same way. It's become more self-critical, particularly in these works that are hitting the, say, 14 to 18 year old readers and bringing them into the genre for the first time." — Professor Amy Sturgis, interviewed by NPR station WFPL for "The Subversive Side Of Science Fiction" (Full podcast at link). [via Geekend]

Here's the new "book trailer" for Catching Fire, the sequel to The Hunger Games, in which the hints of political unrest in the first book appear to be exploding into full-on civil disorder:

And then Suzanne Collins reads from chapter 2 of Catching Fire, in which the President pays Katniss a visit, and we find out just how much she stirred things up when she outwitted the game-masters in the first book:

Catching Fire comes out Sept. 1, and we'll have a review in a couple weeks.

[Scholastic]

The BEA panel happened a while back, but a detailed summary of it just went online over at BSC Review. It's well worth reading, for anyone who enjoys alternate history — but it's required reading for writers, in particular, becuase the authors talk a lot about their writing process, how they deal with moments when they freeze up, and especially how they do research.

The authors in question are: Scott Westerfeld, author of the Pretties/Uglies series, who is now creating an alternate history where Charles Darwin invented bio-engineering and World War I is fought using fantastical hybrid creatures; Holly Black, whose White Cat involves a version of Prohibition where magic is outlawed; and Cassandra Clare, whose alternate Victorian era includes demon-powered automatons.

So why are people, especially young readers, so fascinated with alternate history? Westerfeld theorized that it's because people enjoy recognizing a familiar world, with one jarring difference. But you have to be subtle about revealing this alternate universe to your readers, Black points out: To the characters themselves, this altered reality won't seem strange at all, but simply the fabric of their everyday lives. [BSC Review]

The resulting book (cowritten with dad), The Strand Prophecy, has won several awards, including three Benjamin Franklin awards, and an Independent Publisher book award. According to Amazon:

The Strand Prophecy is a science fiction epic set in the present day. The action begins on the steps of the White House, with stops in the jungles of Brazil and the deepest regions of Africa. Strand, a troubled and reluctant superhero discovers the beginning of a rapid evolutionary cycle. One in which new life and new predators will quickly emerge to threaten all of human existence. He races against time and the U.S. military to protect the innocent, safeguard his niece and along the way, perhaps find redemption for his brothers death.

The Winner twins shared their inspirational story with kids at West Middle School by performing songs they wrote themselves, dancing, and being interviewed by a 3-D robot on a big screen. Warning: newspaper site seems to be launching hostile code. [Downey Patriot]

Maybe The Lab is different from other YA science fiction because Heath was a teenager when he wrote it. (In fact, Wikipedia claims he was 13 when he started writing it.) It came out in Heath's native Australia a couple of years ago, but it's only just coming out this month in the U.S., on Scholastic. Similar to Christopher Paolini, the teen author of Eragon, Heath has written a book that's pure wish-fulfillment and genre candy, without any fiber whatsoever.

Here's a typical passage from The Lab:

The bullet went straight into the exhaust valve, and the missile detonated.

Boom.

Six shielded his eyes with his arm as the blackness of the night was impaled by a ferocious rippling firestorm

Raymond Carver is not looking over his shoulder here. Actually, my favorite sentence in the whole book comes later: "He tested his mind for brain damage." Awesome!

But it's a really fun read, and ideal for kids who aren't particularly interested in introspective coming-of-age stories about outsiders who have to find the strength within, to change their dismal dystopian worlds.

In The Lab, it's an evil future, and 9 billion people live in a walled city, ruled over by an evil corporation called ChaoSonic. There's no government, per se, and mad scientists are literally everywhere. You can't function in society without ID cards and other geegaws, which allow ChaoSonic to track your movements. The main character, Six Of Hearts, is an agent of the Deck, a secret vigilante organization that fights mad scientists and other evildoers. (And every member of the Deck is a playing card. The Hearts are the agents, and the other suits perform other functions. But we pretty much only see the Hearts.) But Six is special, because he's the product of a genetic experiment that spliced human and lizard DNA into a bird embryo. This, we're told at one point, is why Six is always jumping off exploding buildings. Because he has a genetic predisposition to want to fly, even though he has no wings.

There's almost no character development in The Lab, although Six does struggle a bit with the question of whether he's human. But that's not why you would read this book. You read it to watch Six get into and out of a ton of scrapes, and also because the world-building is pretty interesting in parts. When it does slow down, the book fixates on the implications of various schemes to introduce armies of killer robots, or hordes of genetically enhanced super-soldiers. Six is always doing calculations in his head, including his rate of descent when he's dropped off the latest burning building. And he thinks a fair bit about Descartes and other classic philosophers. It's a book that makes being smart seem cool and awesome, because Six usually uses his brain to escape from his various mishaps.

So yeah, if you have a kid in your life who's ready for some YA literature, and he/she isn't really interested in slow, thoughtful books about people finding their place in the world, try giving him/her The Lab. It's basically an action movie on paper, but it could be a nice gateway drug to reading more serious science fiction.

It's a bleak future, and the United States has been destroyed. In its place has arisen the oppressive nation of Panem, which is governed by a venal Capitol. (One of the things I didn't like about the book was the occasional touches of Roman-ishness and nods to "bread and circuses.") The Capitol is surrounded by 13 districts, which service it in a sort of feudal arrangement that leave most of the people nearly starving while the people in the Capitol live in luxury. At some point in the past, the districts rose up, and one of them was destroyed totally. The others must show their obedience to the Capitol by taking part in televised "Hunger Games" every year.

The "Hunger Games" are what they sound like - a battle to the death, with one male competitor and one female competitor from each district. The "reality TV" element comes in because each contestant has to appear likable and relatable, in the hopes of winning sponsorship. If you get sponsors, you can get hold of tools, medicines, and even body armor to help you survive in the games.

The thing that makes Hunger Games more than just another book about a post-apocalyptic battle to the death for the amusement of the elites is the book's hero, Katniss Everdeen. She's one of the least whiny or self-regarding YA protagonists I've ever come across. Growing up in the hardscrabble mining region that used to be Appalachia, she has to step up and learn to hunt in the woods (which is technically illegal) to feed her family after her father dies and her mother checks out. When Katniss' little sister, Prim, gets chosen to compete in the Hunger Games, Katniss volunteers to take her place.

Once the young survivor gets to the Capitol, she has to learn media savvy from the only previous winner of the Games from her district, the drunken Haymitch. And then it turns out that the other contestant from her district, Peeta, has been in love with Katniss for years. (We get a hint of this early on, when the young Peeta risks getting whipped to sneak some burnt bread to Katniss' starving family.) But then Haymitch decides that the best way to boost Katniss and Peeta's popularity - and thus keep them alive - is to play out the "doomed love story" angle as much as possible. Katniss isn't even sure if she has any real feelings for Peeta, but she winds up having to manufacture some for the cameras.

As I said, the reality TV/Lord Of The Flies mash-up about a group of teenagers killing each other on television could be incredibly cheesy, but Katniss' stark narration keeps it grounded. To her, this is just another version of the daily struggle to survive, and yet another way the Capitol works to destroy people in the provinces. The only thing that makes it different is that Katniss is constantly aware she's on camera, having watched the Games in previous years. (Viewing is mandatory.)

Really, the Hunger Games is about learning to become inauthentic, which is a nice spin on the usual coming-of-age story. In your typical coming-of-age tale, the main character starts out with illusions and gradually sheds them, facing up to the harsh realities of life. But Katniss starts out the book already well aware of the worst life has to offer, and she already knows what she has to do to survive. (She does feel bad the first time she kills someone.) Instead, she spends the book learning to become more fake, learning to wear the fancy costumes and say and do the right thing to make the viewers like her... even when she's fighting for her life. Especially then, because she knows she'll be on screen at those times.

I was genuinely bummed when The Hunger Games ended with the phrase, "End Of Book One." It doesn't end on a cliffhanger, exactly - most of the loose ends are neatly tied up - but I actually wanted to see if Katniss would decide that her manufactured feelings for Peeta were real after all.

The Hunger Games isn't exactly a deep work of literature, but it is a fun, exciting adventure story with a cool, believable female hero. And a entertainingly bleak, dystopian world with just enough of a reflection of our own reality to be thought-provoking. And most of all, a media-savvy story of on-camera slaughter by a former television professional. Good stuff, check it out.

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.

As many critics have pointed out, writing YA fiction doesn't mean avoiding so-called adult topics like sex, horror, and politics. China Mieville has written a dark YA novel called Un Lun Dun, and Cory Doctorow has published the highly-political YA book Little Brother. It sounds like Paolo Bacigalupi's YA novel will be political, too. So what exactly separates YA fiction from A fiction? It would seem that it's simply the ages of the protagonists. YA fiction features teen heroes, and A fiction features those over 18.

If age of protagonists is the delineator, that means publishers could easily repackage Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep as YA fiction, since at least half the novel is about two young people on a strange planet. Or hell, why not make Neal Stephenson's new book Anathem YA too? Its protagonist is just 18 years old. But nobody would think Stephenson's book was for young people, just as they wouldn't likely slap "young adult" on the cover of a Vinge tome. Obviously age isn't the only indicator, then: There is something more than safe subjects or young characters that makes a book YA.

I think you and I know exactly what that "something" is. It's niche marketing. We've already got clothing, games, and technologies aimed at teenagers. Now we have scifi books aimed at them too. I don't want you to think that I have some giant objection to niche marketing, because I don't. It's helpful to have bookstores divided up into sections. What I don't like is when one of those sections is specifically designed to repel me, to make me think that I shouldn't be there.

When scifi novels with adolescent protagonists are marketed as "just for adolescents," a curtain of taboo falls between most adults and that novel. In an era where there is so much legal panic around relations between adults and young adults, it's hard to deny your knee-jerk response that there's something slightly distasteful and pedophilic about an adult reading stories aimed at people under the age of 18. I just can't get that scene from the movie Happiness out of my head, where we figure out that one of the main characters is a pedophile because he buys Tiger Beat magazine.

What I'm trying to say is that labeling novels YA in the hope that that will make them "mainstream" may actually backfire. You will certainly alienate possible adult readers, who feel vaguely nasty for cozying up with a genre aimed at teens. And I believe in the end you will lose teen readers, who are exactly the sorts of people who dislike being told that their youth bars them from understanding adult novels. What self-respecting 15-year-old wants to read "young adult" fiction when she could be reading stuff actually written for adults?

The beauty of science fiction is that our hypothetical 15-year-old can read adult fiction and enjoy it just as much as adults do. Not because scifi is simplistic, but because it usually operates on multiple levels: One level is devoted to an adventurous plot, and the other seethes with social subtext and commentary. The most successful scifi novels should work as entertainment for people of any age, and can suggest deeper ideas to people who have been on Earth long enough to want a little contemplation with their space battles.

Many of the recent and forthcoming YA novels in scifi could just as easily be marketed as novels without any particular age designation. My guess is that young people would read them anyway, just as I read adult novels by Rudy Rucker, John Varley, and Robert Silverberg when I was in the "young adult" target market.

If we really want to open science fiction up to new readers, we won't do it by dividing our audience up into smaller and smaller groups. Nor will we expand the minds of young people by telling them that they should only read specially-designated novels for young people. Why not admit that teens have a place in the world of adult imagination, and vice versa? Adults and teens are different in all kinds of ways, but surely they can meet in the world of fiction. Since so much scifi is about changing the future, it seems crucial that this genre forge alliances between youth and adults. We'll build a better space-faring species together if we don't deliberately create generational barriers where they aren't necessary.

Doctorow started the conversation by telling fans that the reason they're not finding his new book, Little Brother is because they're looking in the wrong place:

My editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, rang me yesterday to talk about a weird little phenomenon: people who were going to stores looking for my newest, Little Brother, were walking away unfulfilled because they were looking in the science fiction section, not the young adult section.

Living in a space that no one watches too closely is one of the secret ways that people get to do excellent stuff. Science fiction's status for decades as a pariah genre meant that writers could do things with literary style, theme, and political content that their mainstream counterparts could never get away with (games, comics, early hip-hop, mashups, and many of the other back laneways of popular culture have also enjoyed this status). These days, a lot of the coolest stuff in the universe is happening in the kids' section of your bookstore (and yes, I'm aware of the irony of calling attention to a field that has prospered because it wasn't receiving too much attention to blossom).

I have a friend with access to BookScan, which tracks book sales through stores and retail outlets, who at my request checked the aggregate bestseller list sales of adult fantasy and science fiction against the sale of YA fantasy and SF. Without mentioning specific numbers or titles, my friend says that last week, the top 50 YA SF/F bestsellers outsold the top 100 adult SF/F bestsellers (adult SF and F are separate lists) by two to one. So 50 YA titles are selling twice as much as 100 adult SF/F titles. The bestselling YA fantasy book last week (not a Harry Potter book) outsold the bestselling adult fantasy book by nearly four to one; the bestselling YA science fiction title sold three copies for every two copies of the chart-topping adult SF title. And as a final kick in the teeth, YA SF/F is amply represented at top of the general bestselling charts of YA book sales, whereas adult SF/F struggles to get onto the general bestselling adult fiction charts at all.

Young adult sections in bookstore — a parallel universe of little-regarded awesomeness [Boing-Boing]
Why YA [Scalzi.com]