I have to say that Scott Westerfeld is absolutely amazing!!! I can relate to the characters in his books, and the stories are believable and fictional at the same time. The Uglies and Midnighters trilogies, Extras, and Peeps are all amazing works of SF. By favorite book of all time, however, is A Wind in the Door. I also appreciate the many other books by Madeline L’Engle. Truesight by David Stahler Jr., The Giver by Lois Lowry, and The Last Book in the Universe by Rodman Philbrick are other favorites of mine. Except for Peeps, all these books are set in the future. None of these futures are a bit alike, and they all have their problems, but I still find myself looking forward to the future just because I’ve read them.

Unfortunately, I cannot name any adult fiction books that made as big of an impact on me. I’m not trying to put down adult SF books and authors, but they don’t captivate me in the same way.

2. My second point is that it is very likely that adults are not realizing that the YA SFF is SFF because it isn’t really presented in the same way. Not just the different section in the bookstore, but the entire presentation is different. YA books expect a lot of the marketing to be done by word of mouth, either from teen to teen, or from teacher to student. Book talks are a major part of any school librarian’s job. My choosing a book to talk about during class guarentees that it will be read by a number of students. Some of those students will choose to purchase the book rather than rent from the library.

For the record, I’ve interviewed Knox and those books _were_ written as YA, and the second one is even dedicated to famous New Zealand YA author Margaret Mahy (whose stuff is also brilliant).

1. Fantasy and science fiction readers don’t generally care about age designations. They will read children’s, YA or adult if the title interests them. I believe I first heard this from Bev DeWeese, a librarian extrodinaire and, I think, one of the founders of WISCON and from my experience it rings true.

2. Children’s and young adult books stay in print longer for two reasons: there are new nine year olds, or fourteen year olds, or sixteen year olds every year to need books of a certain type; libraries are a key market for juvenile titles. If a title is still popular with kids and it wears out or gets lost, librarians just re-order it. Though for awhile the professional literature would like to have convinced librarians otherwise, we are still a force to be reckoned with in the kids market.

3. I know all the authors out there would prefer people bought books, but for those of you who would rather die than shop in the YA section of the bookstore, you could look for stuff at your local library. If you slip in during school hours, you may even have the YA area to yourself.

4. Most of the really good (the opeative word being good) children’s and YA authors write for that audience because the story they have to tell happens to fit that niche. I have heard any number of YA authors say they had no idea they were writing a YA book. Their agent just knew that was the market it would sell in.
It’s great to hear kudos for YA authors. A number of authors I’ve met that write for children and/or young adults tell me they are viewed as kind of second class citizens of the literary world — certainly beings of lesser importance, doing that thing that probably anyone could do.

I find most of the stuff blowing me away these days is right there in the teen-read section. I wish I was getting knocked out by a wider variety, but that’s the way the page turns, I guess.

Just in general, I’d say we have to keep in mind, too, that everything published as YA in the States wasn’t necessarily intended for YA to begin with — Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy to start. How Knox intended her work (work originally conceived as YA or just redirected there) has to come into play.

(I’m just throwing that out there — I don’t know Knox’s work from a hole in the ground. Yet.)

Elizabeth Knox’s Dreamhunter Duet is as complex as any adult fantasy I’ve read in the last five years. There’s even romantic subtext involving a golem (and I’d say something else, but want to avoid spoilers).

It’s a fallacy to assume that the only YA being published or read is the type that lands on an acceptable high school reading list. Content itself–or the treatment of the subject matter–is no longer sufficient to knock you out of the YA ballpark (if it ever was). As far as content itself goes, I see far less difference between adult SFF and YA SFF–we could cite extreme examples, but they’d be exceptions and not the norm for either category.

My 18 year old son, who read the Hitchhiker’s Guide books before he started first grade, who is ordinarily quite an avid reader, going through at least five books a week, has had to slow way down. When he is reading he’s reading small books (right now Gentlemen of the Road) because he hasn’t got the time to read anything long.

My oldest, who is in art school, is also pressed for time and has only read two novels recently; Territory by Emma Bull and Otherland by Tad Williams, which admittedly is quite long but I think he’s only got through book one so far.

Once school is out for the summer hopefully they’ll be able to go back to reading again but they won’t be buying many books, not with tuition as dear as it is. It’ll be the library for all of them.

My youngest, going on 16, is the one who has the most time for reading. I’ll be curious to see what happens to his pleasure reading when he hits college.

I agree entirely with Paul Di Filippo about ‘comfort zone’. As an adult, I don’t want to read only about adolescent concerns and adolescent characters. And I certainly don’t want to write only, or mostly, about them. Adolescence is what – an eighth? a tenth of our lives?