Wherefore YA Sci-Fi?

Fresh off the heels of finishing the short story referred to in the previous post, I realize I have no idea what is meant by the cliché “fresh off the heels” or “fresh on the heels.” (Is it an inadvertant combination of “fresh off the presses” and “hot on the heels”?) George Orwell would shame me for saying that.

Let me start again: For the first time since roughly 2009, I have a finished, polished short story that I am ready to put into circulation. I wrote a few between then and now, but they were specialized for contests or based on weird prompts. The story at hand is the first I’ve written in years that was straight from the imagination, for no other reason than I had an idea and I wanted to write it down. Felt pretty damn good, if I do say so myself, and Present Me shall now say “nyah nyah” to Past Me who so recently denounced writing short stories.

Now I face the daunting task of beginning to submit my short story for publication.* This is a circle of hell with which I am intimately familiar; I am both looking forward to and dreading re-entry. Surfing Duotrope today (a wonderful, free alternative to Writers Market), I began narrowing down a list of publications to which to submit my first round. I’ll save my whinging about hard copy submissions for another post, but the target of this particular diatribe is one certain publication that came up in my search results for a publication open to soft science fiction short stories of about 4,000 words. [Anonymous Online Magazine] described its needs thusly: 

"We are looking for hard science fiction, soft science fiction, and everything in between. Think Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, George Orwell or Ray Bradbury with a YA focus." 

“With a YA focus”? Okay, so when I was a “YA,” my YA fiction was Asimov, Orwell, and Bradbury—a lot of Bradbury. (Always and forever, a lot of Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451 fits neatly into the category of read this, like, now.) It should be no surprise that I was a bookworm as a kid. But the books I remember being affected by the most were not novels; they were short story anthologies—more specifically, sci-fi and fantasy anthologies that I rescued from a box of my father’s old books from his college days. I read TheIllustrated Man and The Martian Chronicles until they fell apart.

I used to sneak a copy of copy of Playboy’s 1966 Book ofScience Fiction and Fantasy into my 7^th grade classes with a different cover on it, because I was embarrassed it said “Playboy” and I didn’t want to explain. The stories weren’t dirty, they weren’t graphic. But they made me feel something unexplainable deep inside, like there was something darker, bigger, stranger than myself out there, that there would always be something to be explored, both at the outreaches of the universe and the inner reaches of my soul. I lost my dad’s old paperback somewhere down the road, so a few years back, I tracked down a used copy just to read all the stories again. They were as good as I remembered. “The Fly” by George Langelaan! “I Remember Babylon” by Arthur C. Clarke! “The Vacation” by Bradbury is still to my mind one of the most perfect short stories I’ve ever read.

I don’t remember “YA” being its own genre when I was coming up. As a young adult, I read a few YA books: some were great; some were not so great. But they weren’t the books that turned me into a lifelong reader or a writer. Sure, it was nice to see someone like me in a book, but the books that dug in their claws and never let go were the ones that gave me a salty glimpse of what it was like to be a grown up and still be frightened, whether of what you might find on another planet or of what you might find in yourself.

This may not make me very many friends, but I have to confess that I don’t “get” the whole YA thing. I understand it as a marketing handle, but it ends there. I do believe that there are stories worth telling about characters under the age of 18. But I think it is absolutely essential that fiction not pander. Just like when a mother buys her child a coat or pair of shoes that’s just a little too big so there’s “room to grow,” children and teens should read stories that leave them room to grow. The best fiction shows us ourselves, but also shows us an “other,” so that we may experience the world outside ourselves. (As an aside, Max and Menna by Shauna Kelley is a terrific example of a book marketed as YA that does not pander to its audience whatsoever, but treats them as mature equals.)

As writers, it is not our job to tell our readers who they are by writing something “focused” on who we decide they are. Rather, our job is first to tell the truth, and then to let our readers discover their place in the world through the stories we tell.

*I feel I should explain why I would seek a publisher for my short story when I rally so vehemently against legacy publishing. I have my opinions on this matter, and explain I will, but let’s save that for a future post.