Healey writes:

Bella is often accused of passivity, but although there are certainly faults to be found with her fixation on romance to the exclusion of all other interests, she doesn't actually lack forward momentum. She's the sexual aggressor and instigator of change in her relationship, hurtling through milestones at breakneck speed-first love, first soul-crushing breakup, marriage, sex, childbirth, and motherhood in less than two years-before achieving her goal of eternity in a fairy-tale cottage with her loving family. Her transformation is agonizing and traumatic, but, aware of the risks and owning her choice, she pushes unrelentingly for it anyway. Although I do wonder if Bella's really considered the ramifications of repeating high school over and over again, as her husband and new siblings-in-law do-after this ultimate transformation, she has perfection, but a static and essentially unchanging one.

All in all, I think I prefer YA where the protagonists aren't ever totally satisfied with their transformations. I like fiction that acknowledges the difficulty and terror of acquiring new bodies and new attitudes, but promises that change is not only inevitable, but can be a mindful and ongoing process of self-making, aiming for better days ahead.

via Strange Horizons

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]

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.

The Rolling Stones, by Robert Heinlein. (1952)

One of Heinlein's early Juveniles, The Rolling Stones is about a zany family of Loonies (moon-dwellers) who go on a weird family trip through the inner solar system, picking up a fast-breeding, Tribble-esque "flat cat" along the way. They also visit the crazy "wild west" mining areas around the asteroid belt and get into silly adventures on Mars and Saturn. The troublemaking, anarchic family of Stones show up in some of his other novels too. The Rolling Stones is more fun than Heinlein's groundbreaking first Juvenile, Rocket Ship Galileo (which, like Harry Potter, proved there was a market for YA scifi), and has a lot of the freewheeling, libertarian-hippie flavor for which the author later became known.

A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle (1962)

Meg and Charles Wallace are a brother and sister who discover late one night that their mother's strange visitors are actually extra-dimensional beings who have come to ask their help. The kids' father has been missing for a while, and it turns out his experiments with "tesseracts," FTL technologies that involve folding space, have landed him on a dangerous planet controlled by a psychic computer called IT. Traveling through a harrowing galactic and psychic landscape, the children must deal with everything from bizarre physics experiments to the nature of identity and evil. Beautiful and haunting, this is still one of the most mind-blowing novels a kid could ever read.

The White Mountains, by John Christopher (1967)

Set in a post-apocalyptic England 100 years after aliens called "Tripods" (much like those in War of the Worlds) have taken over, the novel focuses on two kids who are starting to question the values of their society. Every person over the age of 14 is fitted with a mind-controlling "cap" by the Tripods, and afterward loses all ambition or creativity. The humans' culture remains stuck in a kind of perpetual middle ages. A year away from being capped, our heroes decide to strike out on their own and look for a mysterious place in the "white mountains" where humans live uncapped.

Sweetwater, by Laurence Yep (1973)

For slightly younger readers, Sweetwater is a the tale of a kid who lives on a planet full of seamonsters and unknown threats. Rising waters threaten his small town, but even more threatening is the main character's growing relationship with a native of the planet. His own family is part of a colonizing group that has always distrusted the natives. And now our hero must unite the planet's peoples, as well as stop the eco-disaster that's consuming the town.

Star Ka'at, by Andre Norton (1976)

I've raved about this novel before, but I can't say enough good things about it. Like Sweetwater, this one is for slightly younger readers. Psychic cats called Ka'ats from another planet arrive on Earth to gather up their brethren before humans destroy themselves with atomics. Two of the Ka'ats meet up with two very realistic human kids — a nearly-homeless little girl and an orphan boy in a foster home — and befriend them. Not only does the novel deliver a nice dose of psychic kitty, which is pretty much equal to awesome in a kids' book, but it's also full of fairly grownup commentary on race relations and poverty without ever getting preachy or boring.

Alan Mendelsohn the Boy from Mars, by Daniel Pinkwater (1979)

For any nerdy kid who wishes he had psychic powers and could travel between dimensions, this weird novel by NPR commentator Daniel Pinkwater is pretty much the best there is. After Leonard moves to a new school, he's picked on by everybody until he teams up with another dorky kid named Alan — and the two of them embark on a book-fueled journey through consciousness and space. Helped along by a bookstore owner who loans them books on mind-control and interdimensional travel, the two learn to fight the mean kids at their school using their brains. Later, of course, they manage to save an entire other dimension from slavery. Wackier and leftier than a Heinlein novel, but with the same sense of anarchic fun, Alan Mendelsohn should be on any outsider kid's list of must-reads.