Young Adult Science Fiction (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Young Adult Science Fiction Warren Rochelle (bio) Young Adult Science Fiction Ed. C.W. Sullivan IIIWestport, CT: Greenwood, 1999 Young Adult Science Fiction is a working scholar's reference book, divided into three parts: an historical and critical overview, topical approaches, and a bibliography of critical and secondary materials. The first two essays can almost be read as one long essay in two parts. Francis Molson takes the reader back to young adult science fiction's (YASF) roots in the technological series fiction of the first decades of the twentieth century. Such tales of inventive and ingenious American boy heroes set the stage for YASF's origins in the 1940's, the genre having primed an audience to "embrace a fiction that dramatizes both realistic and futuristic applications of science" (19). Such fiction, Molson suggests, teaches American young adults that "youth is capable of 'wonder' deeds, including the devising and performing of technological marvels" (19). Such stories with such messages became the prelude for the stories C.W. Sullivan discusses. Sullivan gives most of his attention to Robert Heinlein's juveniles, beginning with Rocketship Galileo (1947), arguably the first YASF novel. Using Heinlein's juveniles as a paradigm and a starting place, Sullivan comments on the growth of YASF into a genre that is exploring the same themes and motifs as its adult counterpart. American YASF dominates the field, as it does in adult SF, but there is, as this book makes evident, good science fiction written outside the United States, with attention paid to Canadian, British, and German YASF. Canadian YASF is described by Greer Watson as a latecomer to juvenile SF: "True SF did not appear until 1975" (37). Watson provides a good bibliographic essay, noting themes and leading writers and describing the characteristics in both French and English-Canadian YASF. K.V Bailey and Andy Sawyer see British YASF as having a Janus-like "two-way gaze"—back [End Page 223] toward childhood, forward to the adult, and thus is part of a time of "vital emotional and intellectual significance, and the identification of relevant literatures a matter of high importance" (55). Noting the all-important influence of Wells and its recurrent themes, Sawyer and Bailey give the reader a solid description of British YASF, highlighting the more important writers. Franz Rottensteiner's examination of German YASF also notes its place in the territory between childhood and adulthood. Unlike Anglophone YASF, German YASF lacks a Wells; indeed it lacks a Verne and has only really flowered since the 1950's and 60's. It is still only a minor segment of the juvenile book market. Australian YASF, according to John Foster, was truly "launched" in the mid-80's, as "both the numbers of authors and novels published increased greatly" and more important, as a "high proportion of these novels won the critical acclaim of being short-listed for Children's Book of the Year" (90). Australian children's science fiction has entered "the world mainstream, and it is a worthwhile literature in and of itself" (95). The second part of Young Adult Science Fiction is topical, focusing on particular themes and media. Michael M. Levy makes an important link between YASF and the Bildungsroman, a term he has "rarely seen...used in print by scholars in the field" (99 ). (It is worth noting here that many scholars of children's and adolescent literature would disagree with Levy's assertion that the term Bildungsroman is "rarely seen" in the field.) He concludes that, even as science fiction can and does change and reshape the Bildungsroman, such as through a feminist revisioning, that "together the two forms create a powerful vehicle for the symbolic portrayal of many young readers' most cherished hopes for the future" (117). Marietta Frank, in "Women in Heinlein's Juveniles," reminds the scholar that Heinlein's women were not typical SF females in 1947-63—that, regardless of their flaws, "Heinlein should be recognized for his groundbreaking efforts" (119). Stereotypes were broken, and young readers saw there were more choices than they might have guessed. One of SF's strengths, regardless of its audience, is what Martha Bartter considers in her essay...