Equipping Space Cadets: Primary Science Fiction for Young Children by Emily Midkiff

Abstract

Reviewed by: Equipping Space Cadets: Primary Science Fiction for Young Children by Emily Midkiff Karen Sands-O'Connor (bio) Equipping Space Cadets: Primary Science Fiction for Young Children. By Emily Midkiff. University Press of Mississippi, 2022. Interest in, and focus on, science fiction for children has historically been limited. There was a mini-boom in scholarship in the 1990s, with Gary Westfahl's article in Foundation (Winter 1994) on "The Genre that Evolved: On Science Fiction as Children's Literature," C. W. Sullivan III's Science Fiction for Young Readers (Greenwood 1993), and my own work with Marietta Frank, Back in the Spaceship Again (Greenwood 1999) all looking at fiction for progressively younger readers. These works tried to define what science fiction for children meant, and why it was an important genre, in literature ranging from the originally-adult-audienced work of Asimov and Bradbury to space race series from authors such as Robert Heinlein for what we now call tweens and young adults to Jane Yolen's Commander Toad and Joanna Cole's Magic School Bus series for the picture book crowd. Between 2009 and 2014, Farrah Mendelsohn wondered if children's science fiction existed in The Inter-galactic Playground (2009); Neighbors and Rankin focused on children's science fiction film and television in The Galaxy Is Rated G (2011); and several critics began to focus on the ethics and presentation of science in fields such as biotechnology and environmentalism in science fiction for children. Notably, Noga Applebaum in Representations of Technology in Science Fiction for Young People (Routledge 2009) suggested that most children's science fiction was anti-technology in contrast to science fiction for adults. Recent books have examined gender and racial diversity (Ziegler and Richards 2020; Thomas 2019), and educational issues (Kupferman and Gibbons 2019; Lindgren-Leavenworth and Manni, 2021). Emily Midkiff 's Equipping Space Cadets brings together many of these concerns, but focuses particularly on the definition of science fiction and the reading experiences of young children with it. Midkiff herself notes the fraught debate over the definition of children's science fiction in her first chapter, "Definitions and Evaluations," spending several pages over the debate between fantasy and science fiction. She argues, "Insisting that primary sf distance itself from fantasy holds children's literature to different standards than adult literature" and advocates a broad definition of science fiction for children that includes "space opera and silliness and pop culture shenanigans" (24, 25). Here, Midkiff runs up against one of the defining arguments about children's literature in general: not what it is but what it is for. Children's literature is defined by different standards than adult literature, and has been since John Newbery advertised his children's books as encompassing "Instruction with Delight." If books are meant to teach, then the scientific aspects of science fiction for children become critical—and bad science, fuzzy science, and magical explanations all push much of children's science fiction into the [End Page 340] realm of fantasy (and not necessarily good fantasy). But Midkiff is not really concerned with scientific accuracy—indeed, she is not really concerned with books in general, at least in terms of literary analysis. Her chapter on "Comprehending Genre" reveals this clearly, as her focus is on skills being developed in the reader rather than on what individual books contain. Arguing that many children learn about science fiction from film and television, particularly Star Wars and its "series, spinoffs, and films" (39), she suggests that "Children who are familiar with space travel and spaceship crews can approach the story knowing something of what to expect and use it . . . to help comprehend what they are reading" (39). This technique of using prior knowledge to make predictions and cement definitions is true of reading in general, but Midkiff 's explanation—which again advocates for a broad (or "fuzzy") definition of science fiction, does not account for how this can lead to mistakes in comprehension. All science fiction is fiction, but not all fiction is science fiction. Skilled readers can tell the difference between a story that is about a scientific principle or hypothesis (for example, a book where a character has to adjust between...