![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Young Adultness and SF
Jul. 21st, 2009 09:33 pmProdded both by a set of posts about YA and shelving, and by Adam Roberts' tagging of the Hugo-nominated novels (of which I've read three: Zoe's Tale, Saturn's Children, and Anathem), I feel prodded to make a comment or two about YA as a category.
First, a comment about juvenile: like the greek-derived ephebe, this applies to youth: juvens means young, not childlike or "younger than young adult". So the terms juvenile and young adult are effectively synonyms, whatever the marketing and library industries may want to say.
Secondly, as everyone notes, these are marketing categories, not stable genre categories.
As far as I can tell, what some people mean by them is effectively "written like a short and accessible Victorian or Edwardian novel", i.e. not much sex, not much violence, and a fairly straightforward moral universe: by this token Silas Marner, Jane Eyre, and maybe The Moonstone would qualify as YA novels, except that they're adult Victorian novels. More obviously, so would The Prisoner of Zenda, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and Buchan's Richard Hannay books, all of which were written for adults and which have had a long run of being popular and in print.
The other common, but not inevitable element, is a young protagonist; which tends to bias the selection towards bildungsroman novels. So David Copperfield and Oliver Twist become candidates; as does Tom Brown's Schooldays, which was very much an adult novel when it came out.
What Adam Roberts means is a different thing again: a novel with a plain style, no overly complex plot, and fairly "standard" characterisation: middling works with no (or not too much) sex and violence. Again, Hope, Orczy and Buchan fill this slot as well: it's not obvious that having this characterization necessarily makes works mediocre, at least if a measure of mediocrity is "no staying power". It's not a vice to be un-Joyce, or un-James, or un-Sterne-like (and note that I like all three authors).
It's easy to see how these can coexist for marketers who want to target young readers generally, or purchasers for young readers such as school librarians. (Youths may be interested in dirty books (though almost never Chaucer, Rabelais, or Balzac), but their gatekeepers are rather less so.) They don't have to have any conceptual unity, because they can work in a scattershot manner.
There are subsets which probably qualify as a real subgenre: books in the Judy Blume, Sue Townsend, or S.E. Hinton lines which are about teenage angst and which are rarely very appealing to older readers unless (hello, Adrian Mole) they are funny.
The standard SF YA exemplars are Heinlein's juveniles, which fill all three of the main slots I outlined (though they tend to avoid the fourth, teenage angst, fairly well). The modern exemplars would undoubtedly be the Harry Potter books, which manage to break one guideline -- the late ones are very long -- because to the success of the series. The next rank probably includes Panshin's Rite of Passage (a direct tribute to / critique of early Heinlein).
It's not clear from any of this why YA should be effectively a term of semi-opprobrium (which is how I read Roberts' accusation). I do see what he means about the list of Hugo nominees -- I'd rather see Halting State have won the Hugo than Saturn's Children win it, and I don't think that (aside from Anathem, where I disagree with him -- I think it's a strong candidate) it's a particularly strong year for the Hugos. But as "Young Adult" seems to lack any cohesiveness when used as a critical, rather than a marketing term, it might be best to give it a pass and formulate the criticism in a different manner.
First, a comment about juvenile: like the greek-derived ephebe, this applies to youth: juvens means young, not childlike or "younger than young adult". So the terms juvenile and young adult are effectively synonyms, whatever the marketing and library industries may want to say.
Secondly, as everyone notes, these are marketing categories, not stable genre categories.
As far as I can tell, what some people mean by them is effectively "written like a short and accessible Victorian or Edwardian novel", i.e. not much sex, not much violence, and a fairly straightforward moral universe: by this token Silas Marner, Jane Eyre, and maybe The Moonstone would qualify as YA novels, except that they're adult Victorian novels. More obviously, so would The Prisoner of Zenda, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and Buchan's Richard Hannay books, all of which were written for adults and which have had a long run of being popular and in print.
The other common, but not inevitable element, is a young protagonist; which tends to bias the selection towards bildungsroman novels. So David Copperfield and Oliver Twist become candidates; as does Tom Brown's Schooldays, which was very much an adult novel when it came out.
What Adam Roberts means is a different thing again: a novel with a plain style, no overly complex plot, and fairly "standard" characterisation: middling works with no (or not too much) sex and violence. Again, Hope, Orczy and Buchan fill this slot as well: it's not obvious that having this characterization necessarily makes works mediocre, at least if a measure of mediocrity is "no staying power". It's not a vice to be un-Joyce, or un-James, or un-Sterne-like (and note that I like all three authors).
It's easy to see how these can coexist for marketers who want to target young readers generally, or purchasers for young readers such as school librarians. (Youths may be interested in dirty books (though almost never Chaucer, Rabelais, or Balzac), but their gatekeepers are rather less so.) They don't have to have any conceptual unity, because they can work in a scattershot manner.
There are subsets which probably qualify as a real subgenre: books in the Judy Blume, Sue Townsend, or S.E. Hinton lines which are about teenage angst and which are rarely very appealing to older readers unless (hello, Adrian Mole) they are funny.
The standard SF YA exemplars are Heinlein's juveniles, which fill all three of the main slots I outlined (though they tend to avoid the fourth, teenage angst, fairly well). The modern exemplars would undoubtedly be the Harry Potter books, which manage to break one guideline -- the late ones are very long -- because to the success of the series. The next rank probably includes Panshin's Rite of Passage (a direct tribute to / critique of early Heinlein).
It's not clear from any of this why YA should be effectively a term of semi-opprobrium (which is how I read Roberts' accusation). I do see what he means about the list of Hugo nominees -- I'd rather see Halting State have won the Hugo than Saturn's Children win it, and I don't think that (aside from Anathem, where I disagree with him -- I think it's a strong candidate) it's a particularly strong year for the Hugos. But as "Young Adult" seems to lack any cohesiveness when used as a critical, rather than a marketing term, it might be best to give it a pass and formulate the criticism in a different manner.
