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The campaign for shiny futures.

Article Excerpt
When Roger Sutton asked me why science fiction for teens did not get the same attention or respect as fantasy, I wanted to throw up my hands and say, "Because it's written by the ignorant, published by the ignorant, and reviewed by the ignorant--present company included."

Here's why. The notion that SF for the young does not receive respect forces us to ask three questions: Not respected by whom? What do we mean by SF for the young? And was it always this way?

For almost any science fiction reader over forty, science fiction "for the young" means Robert A. Heinlein and Andre Norton. There are others, but these two are the gold standard. Norton began her career writing mainstream adventure for boys (which is why she changed her name), then continued with a long line of juvenile adventure science fiction through the 1960s aimed mainly at boys, along with her classic Witch World sequence, which became very popular among second-wave feminists as well as kids. Heinlein began as a short story writer for magazines and was offered contracts for his juveniles or "family books" by Scribner's on the basis of short stories in The Saturday Evening Post (family reading is a category that has disappeared but needs to be re-examined), and in the 1960s and 1970s gave those up and switched to novels for the expanding adult paperback market. In their juveniles, both writers used the trajectory of the career book: the protagonist would leave home, enter the workplace (sometimes an actual workplace, sometimes a new society), and acquire the skills to survive and prosper. There was very little romance, and, in Heinlein's books, while marriage might be flagged for the future, clever girls mostly went off to be clever.

Heinlein and Norton remain respected by anyone in the SF field who actually knows its history. Unfortunately, the number of people in children's literature who know anything about science fiction is tiny. I think I know all of them. Which explains a truly awful incident when, as a student, I couldn't suppress my shock when the Esteemed Academic teaching a short course on children's SF had not heard of Heinlein and Norton. In children's literature, this kind of ignorance is taken for granted and accepted: where other genres receive specialist reviews, SF for children is frequently reviewed by non-specialists who assume that they can use much the same criteria as they might for a teen romance. This has very real consequences: whenever I point out that a so-called work of children's or YA science fiction is a terrible piece of science fiction, I receive the unthinking putdown (and it is a...

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