What's stopping the adults from reading the YA books, anyway? I still love Meredith Ann Pierce. :)

Well, I read YA as comfortably as adult, but I can understand that there may be people who happen to find stories about those over 20 more interesting than about those under 20, and that's definitely their right.

But I'm uneasy when folks are disconcerted that there are so many good books about folks under 20. Because it sort of implies teens should only have so much of the good stuff, and that after that, we should go back to focusing on adults, who matter more. Or something like that.

I don't get it. Is there such a scarcity of fiction that it's become a zero-sum game? Does every good YA book mean somewhere someone isn't writing a good adult one?

Well, I don't think so. And to be fair, only a handful of commenters do--but that zero-sum-game fear does seem to be there.

But if it were a zero sum game--which I'm not convinced it is--why do folks assume the adults have to be the ones to get the larger/better share of the resulting books?

It's the underlying assumption that adults are more important--more entitled--that I guess bugs me.

Particularly ironic in a genre that has the reputation for luring in its most devoted readers during their teenage years.

I wonder if it's partly because adult fandom is more concerned with getting teens to read their SF/fantasy than with providing them their own. So teens coming over to the adult section, or picking up Heinlein juvenilles, is cool; but teens going over to their own section and reading their own flavor of SF, not so much.

(Every time an adult suggests teens start with Heinlein, I want to scream--but that's a whole other rant. Even as a teen in the late 80s, I could only barely relate to the books of his I read, and the disconnect must be an order of magntiude or three greater now.)

I think you're right -- that's got to be a big part of it. Whatever is there today _must_ be inferior to the stuff they grew up reading.

More, it's not my stuff. They're rejecting my stuff by not reading it, how dare they!

---L.

Edited at 2008-05-12 05:43 pm (UTC)

My problem isn't that teens are getting good stuff, it's that sometimes it feels as if adults are forced into a mold and served only a small subset of all possible stories. Personally, I am finding that more and more of the type of books i like to read appear to be ousted from adult fiction (sometimes literally repackaged) while I am told that as an adult I ought to be reading stories with explicit sex and violence. I'm objecting to that, not to teens having good books.

I definitely don't disagree that adult SF/fantasy readers are entitled to a wider range of stories than they're getting--it's one of the reasons I find myself spending less and less time in the adult section myself. I'm just getting the vibe that the feeling is (sometimes) that it's because the YA SF/fantasy section is expanding that this is happening, and so that expansion is a bad thing--that it's a zero sum game, and worse, that if it's a zero sum game, of course the adults should be the ones who get the larger share of the good stuff.

I'd rather not see it as a zero sum game at all. But even if it is (and I honestly don't know enough about the economics of book sales to speak intelligently about that), I'm okay with it turning out that it's the teens who get "more," rather than the adults. Why do we adults assume it always has to work out in our favor, instead of only sometimes?

I don't think it's a zero-sum game either, but the harsh truth is that the industry may see it that way. "We're going to publish n SF/F books this year, and if m of them are YA, that means n-m of them are adult." What should happen, of course, is that the current generation of YA SF/F readers will be adult SF/F readers in a few years (as well as their younger siblings continuing to read YA SF/F, hopefully) and the publishers will expand their entire SF/F lines accordingly ... whether that happens remains to be seen.

That is the impression I'm getting. It's not a value judgment. It's that the sales have shifted to the YA section, and it's harder and harder to sell adult fantasy. That market, paranormals aside, according to my agent is "in free fall."

It's a big shift, and hard for many writers to accept. Many are seeing formerly successful careers flushed down the drain, and those who can't adapt are not having much luck surviving. I can see where that might cause bitterness in some readers as well as writers, as they all struggle to deal with the new order.

I don't know what the answer is for the adult section from a business perspective. I keep thinking maybe looking at how YA (and adult paranormals) are presented, from a marketing perspective, and trying to transfer something of that over ... but I'm not sure that's the answer either.

What I run into is when I look in the adult fantasy section is seems like more of the same. I know that behind the covers this isn't really true (or not entirely true--every genre is partly more of the same), but I wonder how to the genre can convey this to readers.

I really don't think it's a zero sum game, but I don't know how we convince other folks of that.

I think what's needed that the people who say 'fantasy doesn't sell/nobody wants to read stories that aren't beefed up to the max' ought to look at YA and notice that, indeed, people (and not just teenagers) ARE reading those stories, that there IS a market, and that maybe, just maybe, if they were offering the same type of story with older protagonists for an adult market people (and not just adults) would buy them.

Definitely, on that. YA SF/fantasy does have a different feel than adult, and not all of that has to do with the age of the protagonists, and I'd love to see more adult books like that as well.

That would make sense if the YA and adult publishers were the same. They're mostly separate, though, and so more clearly responding to separate market pressures rather than pure accounting practice.

---L.

That is an important other part of the equation, yeah.

For the most part, the YA lines aren't even specifically SF/fantasy lines--all genres kind of get mashed together under what's considered a YA genre, not a fantasy genre.

I suspect this plays a part in the larger issue too. Because they aren't segregated the same way, they often get better publicity than most genre books seem to manage. Or at least, non-ghettoizing (word?) publicity.

That's a really really good point, about the difference in marketing because of the lack of segregation.

(It also means a writer doesn't have to be only a fantasy/SF writer, if they happen to want to do the stray mainstream or mystery or uncategorizable book, which is really nice from a creative POV, too.)

Edited at 2008-05-12 01:48 pm (UTC)

I agree. What makes YA something less than adult fiction? It's not. And if that's where the best stuff is, that's where the best stuff is. ;)

I think the YA section has the best SF/fantasy being written today, personally. :-)

The way I look at it, the more teens get hooked on reading, the greater our long term job security...

I think so, too, though there is debate about whether it actually happens that way.

But even if that weren't true, I'd still be okay with teens having more good books than adults. I'd rather we all have them, but being a teen is hard enough. Seeing a group of adults going around begrudging them their market share is a bit uncomfortable-making, for me at least.

Perhaps the concern is more that if the YA market is seen as "the" place to be, there will be fewer adult books written altogether as authors flock to the market where they have a better chance at good sales?

I enjoy reading YA fantasy/sci-fi. But it's indisputable that the books themselves have a style and feel different from books for adults, and they are not as complexly written (which of course makes perfect sense). Sometimes, a YA novel hits the spot, but sometimes, I want something with a little more meat on the bone, so to speak.

Some other part of the concern might be that the fight against the stigma against adult fantasy/sci-fi continues, and if the YA selection outstrips and is better than the adult, then there'll be more cries of "fantasy is just for kids."

But it's indisputable that the books themselves have a style and feel different from books for adults, and they are not as complexly written (which of course makes perfect sense).

See, I think this is disuptable, especially about the complexity. I read a book like Dreamhunter or Sabriel, and I see as much complexity there as in many adult books. They're in general slightly shorter (not the same as complexity), but even that is changing--400 pages or more is not at all unusual for a YA anymore, and there are books that are much longer.

I do think YA has slightly different (though with much overlap) concerns from adult books--a mid-life crisis won't interest a teen, though I think finding one's place in the world, or dealing with sex or violence, can interest both. But I find just as much meat in both. Because YA has different concerns and different ways of approaching concerns from adult books, it's not to everyone's taste, but there's just as much meat there--it's just different meat.

But even if all of that weren't true--there's that quiet assumption I'm finding that giving adults the books they need is more important than giving teens the books they need. I think we can do both; but if we did have to choose, I'd be okay with someone deciding to serve teens instead of me, because teens are just as important and just as real as I am.

I believe Sabriel wasn't intended by the author to be YA -- but that's how the publisher categorized it.

I realized a few years ago that many YA books (not just spec-fic, but also realistic fiction) required more emotional maturity to read than many adult books.

Note that I'm saying more rather than as much. Compare Cynthia Voigt's The Wings of a Falcon to the best-selling EFP novels (now with added Marty Stu.)

I'm pretty sure the problem is that there is far more MARKET SHARE for YA sf/f -- and everything else fictional -- these days than for adult niches. A very large turnaround in the publishing market for fiction. This explains why everybody including Chabon are writing YA.

Those who aren't interested or any good at writing YA may be disgruntled. But personally I think this reflects the global population demo, that the largest proportion of the population is younger, rather than older. It also reflects the fact that people don't 'grow up' or at least don't 'grow up' in the ways they used to. People don't leave their youthful enthusiasms behind once they start raising their own families. This is true particularly of the males, it seems. SF/F has always been a mainstay of young male adults. It's generally been written for them from that POV, no matter how old the writer or the reader, even when it was/ is called adult.

It's a waste of energy to be disgruntled. Despite severing ourselves so much from the natural world, evolution is still in play. Things change. They always change!

But then, segments of this field doesn't like change very much either!

Love, C.

My college dormfloor had a reunion last summer. One of my classmate who used to read science fiction when in college, stopped some time after leaving college, despite the fact that where he went to work, and remains employed, is as an engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory--he seemed to have mostly turned into a Standard Suburban Father, other than being a JPL engineer (engineer, not scientist... there apparently are some quite significant differences involved.)

I think it's kind of ironic that this happens at the same time people are complaining about the "aging of fandom". :)

Yes! There's this weird generational disconnect--adult SF readers really feel like teens aren't reading SF/fantasy, when SF/fantasy readers seem (though I have no data on this) simply have very different tastes in what SF/fantasy they're reading, and feel very little connection to organized fandom. (Until you hit, say, an anime con ... they're connecting, just in different places.)

It's sort of like the world has changed, in some way that's hard to define, and the adult genre books haven't managed to change with it, quite, or not all of them have. (Or else they're being marketed as if they haven't changed, even though they have.)

The world has changed. Boomers grew up with the space program "seeking out strange new worlds... boldly [travelling where no one had] gone before."

Contemporary children and youth and such, grew up with antiquated systems for getting people into space that instead of boldly going out into the universe, turned into deathtraps from being "routine" going up into and down out of exclusively low orbit. There not only have not been any people exploring Mars in person and colonizing Luna and the asteroid belt and building starships, there hasn't been anyone physically on the Moon in more than a full generation! t's ancient and DEAD history and has been for years, to people who weren't born when the last Lunar Module left Luna.

The generations born in the 1980s and beyond grew up with personal computers, digital music and digital audio and digital video which have transitioned to being anywhere-anytime with the likes of iPods and such, ubiquitous on-line electronic mail and communications and networking, cell phones and web access anywhere anytime, MTV, Rupert Murdoch "news," "infotainment," computer and video games, etc., as givens...

30+ years ago if someone wanted information they had to go try to finds books and magazines and hunt down archives for anything that wasn't in the much smaller and fewer and farther away bookstores... there was no instant access to more "content" than anyone can read in a few -centuries- with a Google search. There was no Google, no Yahoo, no spam, no Internet (there was the ARPAnet which had mutated from internetworking labs experiment to escaped lab experiment gone totally out of control... most of the problems with the Internet purely come from the fact that the original experiments didn't involve any security and any cognizance/expectation than anyone would ever take what again was a lab experiment and throw it open to the world--as opposed to design something with the idea of it being commercial or at least civil infrastructure, with provisions and design for resistance to not only deliberate malice, but arrant stupidity/incompetence/cluelessness/tunnel-vision/exploitation by greedy opportunist slimeballs. ).

Richard M. Nixon had been evicted from the Presidency, there was a balanced budget, and the religious extremists hadn't taken over the Republican Party and the US Government and implemented [not going there, because there is no way to be polite and inoffensive regardin what hath been wrought...] and a war that makes the involvement in Vietnam look saintly.

Forty years ago there were riots and marches and uproar. Today there is an economic meltdown and the imbalance of ultrarich versus the economic deterioration and the increasing levels of poverty and homelessness in the USA are the worst they;ve been since the economic crash and collapse that hit in 1929.

The "Depression babies" and children are in their late 70s and in the 80s, the ones who are still around. Boomers grew up in a very different time than than and with very different memes. The people under 30 and under 20, the conditions they've grown up with, are different than what the Boomers had as experiences and environmet.

40 years ago segregation was part of large parts of US culture. Women were banned outright from shipduty, from cockpits in airlines and in the military, from a vast array of professional jobs, from Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, Caltech, from most board rooms, from Locke-Ober in Boston....
[stopping now if I haven;t already hit the character limit]

Teens and people in their early 20's were out in full force at Phoenix ComiCon. And the Friday Night Anime Dance? You can't not call it fandom when someone goes to that much trouble for costuming.

Back in the day, communication with other fans was harder so cons had a totally different feel, more of a family reunion. Now people have different expectations from cons, it seems like there is much more of a party or special occasion vibe. Except gaming cons, I think.

Except that it's not true. It is a result achieved by ignoring another class of books that is seen as below the pale: tie ins.

Currently the best selling sf writer in the US is Karen Traviss who achieved the number one spot on the New York Times Best seller list with a Star Wars novel.

Snobs R Us.

That is a point, too. SF folks are good at ignoring whole categories of books. (Stephanie Meyers still probably outsells even tie in books ... but overall, yeah.)

For better or for worse, for lesser or greater accuracy, I've always considered Star Wars books YA!

Love, C.

Did any of them consider that one of the drivers is demographics, that the Baby Boomers are hitting ages where their book consumption has been dropping (one impolite fact is that the number of Boomers is dropping.... people I've known for years, who aren't around anymore, another one gone this weekend, of the Baby Boom generation), and there a decade and a half ago was the start of fecundity with more babies being born per year in the USA than at the height of the baby boom?!

Sales followed demographics, and the demographics is that there are a LOT of kids and teenagers around these days, and a dropping number, again, of Baby Boomer buying books.

(Having said that, a lot of the current YA leaves me unattacted, particularly most of the YA urban fantasy, even when it's by authors who adult UF I like. But then, I found out the hard way that despite being a long long LONG time out of high school, I have a psychic hives reaction to high schools, or had the second time I went to a New England folk arts festival which gets held at high schools. I did NOT want to be in that building, emphatically not--and most of the urban fantasy that's YA that I've seen tends to involve e.g. high schools and standard situations involving "ordinary" school life. I don't quite understand why it didn't bother me about Buffy--on second thought, with Buffy Sunnydale High School was not a "normal" high school, and the "normal" students at it were the ones who got portrayed as peculiar and weird and offputting.

The YA UF I find unreadable, seems to treat "normal" as "normal" and have everyone act or try to act "normal" and regard "normal" as how everything ought to be--it's a literature celebrating and reinforcing status quo of the real world and its values, not questioning it, and regarding anyone who's not normal or who doesn't want to be normal, as wrong.

Again, that's perception on my part, and could very easily be way off base.)

When I was a kid, the great SF was effectively YA: short and fun. Do all YA novels feature kid protagonists? Otherwise, there's no difference: short fun sf is short fun sf.

Well, the short part isn't so true anymore. :-) And fun--so long as your definition of fun encompasses dark books as well as light ones.

I think YA novels have teen (not kid, which would be middle grade) protagonists nearly all the time, but not quite all--it's not a hard and fast rule. But they do have to be about things relevant to kid lives. (So sex and violence are fine; midlife crises, not so much. :-))

Oh, I agree about the long ones--the exceptions that test the rule--and my idea of literary fun definitely includes dark ones. Dune and the Foundation Trilogy are great YAs. There's a telling quote somewhere from Heinlein in which he says he wrote his novels for kids simply by making the characters' ages younger.

Is the current hierarchy kiddie, kid, YA? I was just being general when I used "kid."

There are more and more of the long ones, though--not sure they're exceptions anymore, though the short ones are still there, too. (Pre-Harry Potter, they were something of an exception, and longer YA books were really hard to sell.)

I think of the hierarchy (so to speak) as being picture books, middle grade (older elementary school kids), and YA (teen). Though between picture books and middle grade there are a lot of reading-on-my-own shorter chapter books, too, which are their own category.

Middle grade and YA are actually really different, though not all adult SF/fantasy readers really know that--when an adult gets horrified that edgier content would be in a YA, it often turns out they're really thinking middle grade when they say YA.