by Ellen Datlow
THE ANDRE NORTON AWARD
The Andre Norton Award for Best Young Adult Science Fiction or Fantasy Book is an annual honor that was first given in 2006, for works published in 2005. It honors the memory of one of the field’s most prolific and beloved authors, Andre Norton, a SFWA Grand Master and author of more than one hundred novels, including the acclaimed Witch World series, many of them for young adult readers. Ms. Norton’s work has influenced generations of young people, creating new fans of the fantasy and science fiction genres and setting the standard for excellence in speculative fiction writing.
Nominations are based on the same process as the SFWA Nebula Awards, except that a book begins its eligibility on the date it is published anywhere in the world in the English language, and the Andre Norton Jury may add any number of works to the preliminary ballot and up to three works to the final ballot. Any book published as a young adult science fiction / fantasy novel is eligible, including graphic novels, with no limit on word length.
Previous winners are Valiant: A Modern Tale of Faerie by Holly Black and Magic or Madness by Justine Larbalestier. The 2008 winner is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling.
THE NEW GOLDEN AGE
THE RISE OF YOUNG ADULT SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY
GWENDA BOND
Gwenda Bond posts often about books and writing at her blog, Shaken & Stirred (gwendabond.typepad.com). She has written for Publishers Weekly and the Washington Post Book World, and is currently pursuing an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Harry Potter.
Many people would say that the explosive growth in young adult science fiction and fantasy can be summed up and attributed in total to the unprecedented popularity of J. K. Rowling’s series about the boy wizard. They wouldn’t be entirely wrong. The truth is that Rowling’s novels did push open the doors to the category, and that new YA readers entered by the millions.
It’s that simple, but it’s also more complex. Science fiction and fantasy—in particular, fantasy—have always appealed to teen readers. Since the genre’s inception, many of its finest writers have chosen to write for children and young adults, at least on occasion. Writers like Andre Norton, Jane Yolen, Diana Wynne Jones, Robert Heinlein, and Joan Aiken are cases in point. Not to mention the fact that many seminal works like Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five are regularly read by teens to this day. Even if the books aren’t strictly speaking YA, they definitely fit YA and children’s editor Sharyn November’s definition of the term as “what teens read.” And, as demonstrated by November’s own Firebird imprint, SF/F novels originally written for and marketed to adults by writers like Charles de Lint and Emma Bull have equal appeal when repackaged for teen audiences.
The continual moaning about the state of the SF/F field has become all too familiar—the conventional wisdom says that it’s stagnant, that readers aren’t connecting or buying, that the audience may be dying out. Many of the same issues plague mainstream literary fiction. Yet what rarely gets talked about in these conversations is that the YA and children’s segment of publishing is indisputably thriving. The Children’s Book Council’s sales survey estimates that YA sales alone have increased 25 percent in recent years. Ask any children’s librarian, literature expert, or advocate and they will tell you that SF/F is the most popular type of book with young readers. That demand coupled with increasing sales has created a robust, competitive scene where young readers demand strong voices and satisfying stories.
Within the SF/F field as a whole, there are recent signs that YA fiction may finally lose its status as the younger sibling who might make good someday. SFWA’s creation of the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy in 2005 certainly points in the direction of increasing credibility and recognition of the quality of the work being produced for younger readers. This year’s Norton Award winner was none other than Rowling, the woman who kicked open the door, for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final installment in her blockbuster series. Hers may have been the most famous name among the slate of nominees, but that’s hardly surprising given that four of the six remaining contenders were up for debut novels—Ysabeau Wilce, Steve Berman, Sarah Beth Durst, and Adam Rex. The remaining two nominees were Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, for her second novel, and veteran SF writer Elizabeth Wein, for her fourth.
Some of these names are new to the genre and some aren’t, but the list is remarkable for the range of new talent it showcases. Name another literary award that gives a similar number of newcomers a place at the table (that isn’t expressly designated for newcomers). Just as remarkable as the number of fresh faces is the freshness of the books in question. Durst’s mostly lighthearted riff on classic fairy tales could never be mistaken for Wilce’s coming-of-age story embroidered with wildly ornate world-building. Yes, Rowling has been a unique attractor, bringing attention and readers, but this was a segment of the field ready to expand its borders. The result has been a true golden age of YA fiction in general, and of YA science fiction and fantasy in particular.
Part of the success and freedom many authors are finding comes from YA science fiction and fantasy’s dual status as part of the mainstream and a ghetto. Children’s and YA publishers typically don’t segment their offerings by genre, and SF/F is a highly regarded part of children’s tradition. There is no automatic stigma attached by bastions of literary snobbery to works of SF/F; instead, fantastical works are considered as literary as any other type of fiction. The majority of stigma experienced by those working for younger readers comes from those younger sibling perspectives—children’s literature, YA included, is still often ghettoized by those outside its ranks in adult markets, because it is for younger readers and perceived as less complex than work for adults. This coexistence enables writers of YA SF/F to enjoy, literally, the best of both worlds—being respected by one’s peers, but largely free from the prying eyes of judgmental outsiders. (SF/F for young adults has escaped much of the hand-wringing over content that chick lit and other parts of the YA scene have come in for—so far.) From this unique set of conditions has come outstanding, inventive work at both short story (Kij Johnson’s novelette included in this volume) and novel length (Holly Black’s Valiant, the first Andre Norton winner).
The children’s and YA field also comes with inherent gate-keepers that are vocal about bringing attention to books. Librarians and teachers champion the best books they encounter, and are able to translate that into real readers and increased sales through prestigious awards like the American Library Association’s Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature (which recognized three novels with fantastical elements in 2007, including the winner) and lists such as the Best Books for Young Adults. Likewise, these advocates draw attention to the books they see the target audience responding to. What this means is that works deserving of more attention often get it. The underlying shape of the children’s and YA field fosters innovation through such recognition, and teens are buying in big time.
Debates rage about whether these new young readers of SF/F will someday translate into an increase in adult genre readers. But maybe that isn’t where the focus should be. Perhaps this is a case where the older sibling can learn from the younger one, and be strengthened by the relationship. Why are readers—both teens and adults—responding so strongly to YA at the moment? That is a question it would serve us well to keep asking. My hope is that the excellent YA work being produced today continues to not only find young readers, but inspire future writers to press the larger field’s boundaries further.
CLUBBING
ELLEN ASHER
Ellen Asher began reading science fiction at the statistically average age of twelve. She entered the field professionally when she became science fiction editor at New American Library, a post she held from 1970 to 1972. In February 1973 she became editor of the Science Fiction Book Club, where she remained fo
r over three decades, retiring in June 2007 with the title Editor-in-Chief. In 2001 she received the Edward E. Smith Memorial Award for Imaginative Fiction (the Skylark) for her contribution to science fiction, and in 2007 she received the World Fantasy Award in the category Special Award: Professional. She lives in New York City.
I edited the Science Fiction Book Club for thirty-four years—a figure that surprises even me—so Ellen Datlow thought it might be interesting if I wrote something about my experience.
I considered taking a look at how online stores have changed the bookselling world, but the result was pretty boring. So I added a few notes about my life as editor of the club—first as a very junior editor in the Doubleday Book Clubs scheme of things, eventually rising to the eminence of editor-in-chief (and, unlike the editors-in-chief of some of the other clubs, I actually had another editor reporting to me; corporate life is grand). And the notes metastasized. 062-39333_ch01_4P.indd 301 ½3/09 1:19:41 AM
It was, in almost every way, a dream job. In my early years, long before the German publishing giant Bertelsmann arrived in our lives, the SFBC was part of Doubleday—just one sucker on the book club arm of the Doubleday octopus. It was a specialty club and therefore more lowly in the corporate mind than the big general-interest clubs (the Literary Guild and the Doubleday Book Club, if you care) or even than a club like Mystery Guild that catered to a big, popular special interest. But—and here’s the beauty part—no one else in the division knew anything about science fiction. Or wanted to. They simply heaved a sigh of relief that they’d found someone who knew the field and didn’t actually have two heads, and they left me alone. I could buy whatever I wanted, I could feature whichever books I wanted in the catalogue—I could even set the pricing, which is something that the marketers for most of the other clubs held on to like mongooses clinging to cobras. No one ever questioned anything, or, if they did, it was timidly and apologetically.
This idyllic situation couldn’t last indefinitely, of course, but I had a good long run for some fifteen years. Then two things happened: the market for SF (and therefore the potential profits) got a lot larger, and the whole book club business became bigger and more complex, especially after Bertelsmann bought Doubleday and spun the clubs off into their own separate corporation. Computers also made a difference; they made practicable a degree of both organization and oversight that wouldn’t have been worth the cost in time and energy when everything was done more or less manually.
And it was done manually for longer than you might think—computerization came slowly to the Doubleday clubs. Back in 1986 when Bertelsmann bought us, we had a computer—a big mainframe that lived in, I think, Indianapolis. It could do a few things. But most of our records were on six-by-eight-inch cards kept—in ink—by nice ladies of a certain age. Bertelsmann was horrified—why, when their shiny new company had a shiny reasonably new computer, were we still using index cards? So they laid off the nice ladies and discontinued the file cards—and then discovered, to their even greater horror, that they had, in effect, fired the computer. It took about three years to assemble enough new data to know what we were doing. The moral is, I guess, make sure you really know what you’re doing before you empty the trash.
Anyway, marketing and financial departments began to play a bigger and bigger role in the SFBC’s daily life. We were blessed, though, in almost always getting excellent people—people who did their jobs well and didn’t try to do mine (I’m afraid I wasn’t so restrained; I never did manage to get my fingers out of the pricing sandbox, and many lively conversations were the result). In fact, I tended to be rather grateful to them, since they did the highly statistical jobs I didn’t want to do and wouldn’t have been very good at. In the same way, I was grateful to my bosses, who dealt with senior management with a tact I probably couldn’t have mustered, at least not when I was really worked up about some piece of corporate stupidity. And since that corporate stupidity was, in fact, sometimes corporate intelligence—I hate to admit it, but I can be wrong—it’s just as well that there were intermediaries.
And I had lots of other help: the long-suffering editors I worked with who compensated for my blind spots, the copywriters and art directors who created both the catalogues we mailed and the jackets for our exclusive editions, the production people who made sure we had actual books to put in the mail. They were uniformly wonderful, and I thank them from the bottom of my heart.
The trends of more and more oversight and more and more bureaucratic complexity have continued unto the present. It’s unavoidable given the size of the business and the nature of today’s commercial world. Even at the end, I could get away with doing things my way even if it wasn’t how everyone else did them, simply because I’d been editing the club successfully for so very long and knew it so well. Also, when moved to wrath, I bite. My successor (a talented SF enthusiast named Rome Quezada) lacks those advantages. On the other hand, he has a degree of excitement and enthusiasm which, I have to admit, I was losing. I still loved the job, but thirty-four years (and three months and twenty-four days) is a long time, and it’s probably for the best that the club has new eyes and a new mind to bring it into the future.
NEBULA AWARD NOMINEE, SHORT STORY
CAPTIVE GIRL
JENNIFER PELLAND
Jennifer Pelland lives just outside of Boston with an Andy, three cats, and an impractical amount of books. Her work has appeared in venues such as Helix, Strange Horizons, Apex Digest, and Electric Velocipede, and her first short story collection, Unwelcome Bodies, was brought out by Apex Books in February 2008. “Captive Girl” was also on the 2007 Gaylactic Spectrum Awards short list.
In the choreographed chaos of space, she searches for patterns that do not fit. She listens to the hiss and murmur of the inter-stellar winds; she peers into the visible spectrum and beyond.
Whistling particles stream by, and her mind sizes them up, then discards them as harmless background radiation. Just flotsam on the solar winds. Wait, that light—No, it’s just a weather satellite catching a glint of sun. Too close, anyway. She does not let anything approach the planet without scrutiny.
Motion.
She zooms in, listening hard.
“A-s-t-e-r-o-i-d,” she types out. “Possible collision course.”
There is a scroll across the very bottom of her vast vision. “We see it. Calculating now.”
She looks away. The team is on it. This asteroid could simply be a distraction, and she does not want to be caught unawares. There will be no repeat of last time. Not on her watch. 062-39333_ch01_4P.indd 305 ½3/09 1:19:41 AM
“It’s a miss,” the scroll says. “Shift’s over. Come on back.”
And her mind contracts, sinking down, down, plummeting back to the surface of the planet, past the colony domes, into the bunkers, deep underground.
Alice gasps through her chest tube as she crashes back into her body.
Mittened hands grope at the metal mask welded to her face, and she’s shocked to realize that they’re hers. She sags forward onto her walker, resting the mask on the padded bar that rings her. She is too tired to call up any video, any audio, and surrenders her overextended senses to nothingness. She struggles to walk forward a few steps, but the seat/body interface chafes, and she works her mouth in a silent gasp behind the metal.
Soft hands are on her back, and she trembles.
With a faint volley of static, her earpieces switch over to internal audio. “It’s all right. Just relax. You’re with us again.”
With her tongue controls, she types out, “Marika.”
And the hands move to the back of her bare scalp, running along the edges of the mask, along super-sensitized skin. “I’m here.”
Alice grips the walker tight in her mittened hands, every part of her body warm and shivery. She clenches around the seat/body interface and lets a hard breath out through her chest tube.
She feels a light kiss on her scalp, and Marika whispers, “They’re watching.”
&
nbsp; “I know,” Alice types back. “I don’t care.”
Marika pulls off Alice’s mittens, takes her nail-less hands in hers, and says, “My beautiful captive girl.”
Behind her mask, Alice swoons.
She hears the rude buzz of the intercom, and over it, Dr. Qureshi says, “That was a good shift, Alice.”
“Thank you,” she types.
“Dr. DeVeaux, I’d like to have a word with you.”
“I’m busy with Alice,” Marika replies, and gently kneads Alice’s shoulders through her thin cotton gown. Alice’s head swims, and she rocks the mask back and forth across the bar. Why won’t they just leave the two of them alone?
“We need to discuss Selene’s readings,” Dr. Qureshi says.
“I want Marika to stay.”
“I really do need her help.”
Marika leans in and whispers, “I’ll be back as soon as I can.” She gives Alice’s shoulders a squeeze, and when she lets them go, the shock of absence makes Alice draw in a pained gasp through her chest tube.
