I saw Mark Twain mentioned a few times, and felt a need to comment on him. As a very young child, I hated him for “Chicken Soup with Rice” which is a children’s book about how a little boy loves eating that. It’s quite repetitive and somehow just sounded set me off. Then in 6th grade my class read Tom Sawyer, and the racism and sexism pissed me quite a bit. But then when I was fourteen, a friend whose opinion on books I highly respected recommended The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts, which turned out to be one of my all-time favorites. I’ve since read a bit of Mark Twain’s work from near the end of his life (he died while still working on the Manuscripts) which I appreciated much more than his earlier works. I strongly recommend the Manuscripts. Let’s just say that the well known Evangelion series drew some inspiration from it, particularly in the last few episodes and the two movies, and with the character Kaworu. The Manuscripts are set more than half a millenium earlier, and are often much more philosophical/psychological. ‘Nuff said.
I think I tended to try and steer clear of “YA” sections, since the YA books I read were often found both in the YA section and the “normal” section because pre-teens could read them but adults loved them as well. I loved Dark Carnival for not really having a YA section that my mother could confine me to, and thus couldn’t tell me “that’s a grownup book” like she did with Juniper and Sabriel for reasons that I never understood because she’d unknowingly let me buy books with “worse” content like Marjorie Kellogg’s Dragon Quartet and McKiernan’s Dragonstone at age ten or eleven simply because anything with “Dragon” sounded harmless to her if she didn’t recognize the author. Luckily I was intellectually mature enough that I could handle content often considered too intense (philosophical, psychological, or violent) for my age group, and the sexual things went right over my head anyways and therefore were a non-issue in terms of “corrupting my innocent little child mind”. I was reading SF/F (and not the kind that’re really pure romance/horror/action masquerading as SF/F) and therefore that sort of content was never the focus of books I read.

The bookstore also has many out-of-print books and the original versions of UK/Australian/foreign English-language books instead of the oft watered-down and altered US versions, and in general has an awesome selection of books, plus their tiny YA-specific section actually has quite decent books with more of the slightly-older awesome ones and few of the new overly-hyped crap.
I’m so grateful that I live so close to that bookstore, and that I was aware of it (and thus a frequent customer) all through my childhood. The people at the store would never talk down to me for being a child, even though 8-14 year old me appeared to be 6-12, and treated me like any other customer, the only exception being that they’d often go through the stack of books I intended to purchase and then back to the shelf to find that one copy that had been marked to half price but somehow was still around with its full-price siblings, so that my mother could buy me the books I wanted instead of re-shelving them. They also let me park my bike just inside the door, and keep an eye on it whilst I disappeared into the shelves for an hour of book-hunting. Though it was quite amusing to see “grown-up” customers walk in the door, glance at the bike that obviously was sized for a pre-teen/child, and then when they saw me browsing shelves would ask if they could help me find the book my mommy said she wanted for Christmas. Of course, to a glare and a reply that I had gotten a gift certificate for Channukah and my mother could get her own books. Usually they’d look confused, then would be delighted and start recommending tons of great stuff when it clicked that here was a ten year old who Actually Loved Reading, and that if I was in the store and knew my way around then clearly I was not the “only reads Harry Potter and Animorphs” kid.

I guess the point of this overly-long comment is to tell you all that there’s still hope in kids my age (and younger! best thing ever- recommending epic books to my younger friends, who recommend them to their even younger friends…thus we spread the knowledge and attempt to create more info-geeks) so don’t despair. From what I can tell from this comment thread, I’m assuming that a large portion of the previous posters were also “that SF/F-obsessed kid who read all the time and kept getting annoyed when their parents tried to separate them from a book or didn’t want to buy them yet another stack of books each week, or when well-meaning librarians and bookstore employees redirected them away from ‘grownup books’ under the impression they lost their way to the childrens’ section” I have many more info-geek friends who also spent childhoods with the epic SF/F books, so there’s a lot more current child/preteen/teenage appreciators of good literature than you might think. Though given that I live in the SF Bay Area (East Bay) there might be a higher concentration of us here than many other places and thus my statement might not be quite so valid elsewhere. And we have http://www.darkcarnival.com/, (I always find out about their epic author visits/book-signings -after- they happen, like Neil Gaiman and Cory Doctorow and Jane Yolen and Garth Nix. So frustrating!) and we also have some rather nice libraries.

If anyone reads this, I’m guessing that if they haven’t heard of it before, they probably now want to get over to Berkeley so they can go to the bookstore I’ve been raving about for a large portion of my comment which I just realized is quite long. Oops.

Summary: This seventeen year old (yes, me) loves reading what you all consider to be good literature, loved more of the same all through childhood from an early age, disdains the kind of literature that is making you all disappointed in the reading habits of “today’s youth”, and knows many more people, teenage and preteen and younger, who also appreciate the good literature and (shockingly) highly favor it over the TV that they all barely watch.

Seriously, thanks for taking my question and turning it into such an interesting and informative thread.

Just FYI: I’m not nearly as old as my question- and your answer- might suggest: I’m about the same age as JS and I have a son who’s about the same age as Athena.

I read the Heinlein juveniles in the mid 80′s. It didn’t occur to me at all that they were out of date- but I’m sure I’d feel differently if I reread them today.

Lots of good suggestions for YA SF here- but I think I’ll still try to get Sam to try some of the Heinlein ones.

Currently, the youth for whom I buy gift books are my nephew Joey, 10, and my cousins [who stand more as nieces in relationship to me within our extended family] Morgan, 13, and Taylor, 16.

I don’t buy books for my sister’s five children because they’re non-readers and Charismatics who avoid SF. Harry Potter is verbotten and evil, but Narnia’s okay. They still get Borders gift cards.

Joey, despite being raised by two non-readers and exposed to constant TV, anime, DVDs, and computer gaming through his dad, my nine-year-youngest sibling, did devour Harry Potter, the manga, and comics I bought him over the years. The last books I purchased for him were Winkler’s Hank Zipzer series.

Last May I bought Morgan Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching collection and last month for her 16th Taylor received Zoe’s Tale.

I know Taylor has a taste for SF because she’s the one whom I first saw with a copy of Westerfield’s series.

The trick is developing readers in a world of too many distractions.

As for modern authors, I found Varley’s “Red Thunder” series a strong candidate for YA SF, though I don’t know if it were marketed as such.

JJB

I think maybe Heinlein’s novels would sell better now if they were put into schmancy-fancy omnibuses, like Bujold’s Miles series and Brust’s Taltos books or even Zelazny’s Amber books. Most people don’t want to spend $8.00 for a single book they think they could find at a library or a garage sale.

By the way, I just finished reading Android’s Dream a few days ago and plan to read more of your books when I get the chance, because Android’s dream was all kinds of shiny. The semester’s winding down; I’ll have more time during the summer. However I did truly want to know what Robin’s ranking was, especially after she took over the Nidu! I am madly curious . . . I was disappointed Android’s Dream never gave her ranking, especially since ranking seemed like such a huge issue. To me that question more than anything leaves the book open ended. How high-ranked will she be? Will Earth try and curry her favor now? Any assassination attempts, because that might raise their ranking then too, if she had a high rank? What the heck will her adopted parents think of all this, and especially if they end up meeting Harry Creek– because there’s no way to hide that they were raising a sheep-daughter NOW, even if they didn’t know before. (Just think of what the neighbors will say!)

What about old Asimov, like Elijah Bailey and R. Daneel Olivaw books? Better story telling than the Foundation series in my opinion and still suitable for teenagers. It may be sexist though – I don’t remember it well enough to say. I think all the Asimov robot book would hold up pretty well. I’ll have to get copies to share.

Childhood’s end seems sort of dated to me. But I’m trying to get them to read Fountains of Paradise.

Don’t worry about it. Rather like Starship Troopers, worry more about what people who have only seen the movie version think they’re going to get when they read one of your other books. While I quite enjoyed Jumper the movie, I don’t see anything recognizable in movie Davey that was in book Davey, though I think it’s awesome you got some dough outta the deal, and hopefully more recognition for your work.

I bet Wildside would make a good movie, if put in the right hands. And I’d still like a movie made of the book Jumper. :)

Deep breath. My little book is not only all grown up and going places, it’s getting Alzheimers. Soon it’ll be drinking metamucil and wearing Depends.

I can read Shakespeare and be only mildly annoyed by some of the sexism because it took place so long ago, it was like another world. Really, it was another world, and even in his more fantastical plays, the sexism and racism and other -isms are all firmly nailed to his culture.

But books written in the 50s and 60s and 70s have sexism that feels uncomfortably like the sexism that still exists today. It’s often written by people who are still alive today. And worst of all, its future is my now, or my in-the-future, which makes it even worse: it’s not just a matter of assumed cultural sexism, but that these people who could imagine far-away worlds and alien cultures could not stretch themselves far enough to get past ingrained cultural attitudes about gender. And thus wrote them as assumed and natural and existing in the future.

It makes the shiny rocketship future a lot less appealing when it’s full of “And girls are sort of silly, you know.”

“If that wasn’t going to be the case with old SF, why would we still recommend people read like like Mark Twain, etc.?”

The question isn’t what one recommends to teens to read. It’s what teens want to read when they read on their own.

Like any consumer, they most read what is best marketed to them. (see also: Twilight)

And leaving aside the fact that Mark Twain is not nearly as high on the average teen casual reading list as you appear to assume it is

I’m not assuming it – they get assigned to read it in schools (well, the ones without the PC patrol in charge of the reading list). I never got that one, but I did get assigned Of Mice and Men, and To Kill a Mockingbird.

, as noted in the entry itself, there’s a difference between work which can be placed in the context of its own time, and science fiction, which is explicitly about a future time — which must be a follow-on to our own. In that context, Huck Finn and his crew are rather more believable to current YA readers than John Thomas Stuart XI and his crew.

Twilight characters are believable(ish), too, as long as they’re set in a realistic (for their setting) way. I think old SF (YA or not) is more like science fantasy these days, or perhaps alternate history, and thus seems to be slipping into a category of its own. Certainly when I read books written decades before the Viking landers, I knew this wasn’t based on science fact as known in my era, and it was fine, as that’s not what was enjoyable about the stories.

ou’re making the point that even though old YA SF is old, it’s still interesting. That may be so, but my point is: so what?

And there we go – that’s all I was really saying. :)

Moreover, your argument of “outdated SF didn’t bother me” is not a very good one, either. Maybe it didn’t bother you, and that’s nice for you. It didn’t bother me, either. But as I’ve also noted, back when I was reading Heinlein juvies, there wasn’t nearly as much good YA-oriented science fiction;

I wasn’t looking for ‘YA’ fiction at the time, just good stories.

Eh. She was a very modern character for 1954, yes. Today she’s not so much. Which goes rather to my point. The assumptions of today are not the assumptions of yesterday. Today’s teens are going to be rather more interested in Scott Westerfeld’s Tally than Heinlein’s Betty Sorenson.

Holy crap – did you actually remember her name?! I couldn’t. :)

On to your point –

Probably. But to this day, I still wonder what it was that her parents did that made her divorce them. And that’s 30 or so years after reading the story. Try that with Westerfeld, as great as his work is. (the dirty Pluto-hater)

I’m speaking specifically about science fiction; I’m not covering fantasy.

(see note about about old SF being more aligned now with science fantasy or alternate history).

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@something by someone :) -

If you check out when he wrote “For Us, the Living”, you’ll see he started out with adult stuff he knew wouldn’t get published (or at least, wouldn’t pay the bills), and then turned to juvies. It’s a pretty interesting read from the point of view of someone who’s already read virtually all of his work, to see the characters and topics he wrote about for decades afterwards, and to realize he had all that stuff decades earlier, that it wasn’t something he worked his way towards.

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@something else by someone else :) -

It’s a big mistake to assume that if something applies to someone who’s “young-at-heart,” it will apply equally well to someone who is actually *young*.

If you’re referring to me, realize I stated I read all this old RAH stuff when I was a kid (and it was pretty old stuff by that point). I read it knowing it was obsolete, and recognizing the attitudes in it were very different from the time I lived in, and I still enjoyed it quite a bit. I’m the person I am today in large part because of Heinlein’s stories, even though I disagree with him philosophically (or, more accurately, many of his protagonists) on some pretty major points (especially Libertarianism). I’m not sure you can really call RAH a Libertarian, as I suspect a Libertarian wouldn’t come up with a character with the pragmatism of, say, Professor de la Paz. I don’t see any proof (yet) that a supply of higher-quality/more-socially-relevant material for kids prevents a kid from enjoying something ‘obsolete’. Case in point: Harry Potter. That stuff is of marginal quality in many respects (very memorable and sympathetic characters, though), while much better work is out there. If quality was the measure of success, Microsoft wouldn’t be where it is today. I don’t see that that lesson doesn’t apply to literature for juveniles. Whether something is ever presented in a palatable way to a kid is the real issue, like I said – marketing.

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@69 Jeff – Jeffon 30 Mar 2009 at 7:08 pm

As I am a childless, old bastard that already hollers at kids to get off my lawn, I am forced to consider whether the SFYA genre is for me. There seems vanishingly little chance to come up with a “classic”, that would be untarnished by time, especially given the nature of SF.

Dude, get to a bookstore and get Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies/Pretties/Specials/Extras books. Also his duology, ‘Peeps’ and ‘Last Days’ (I like the first one best, but YMMV). And there’s a reason Cory Doctorow’s “Little Brother” has been nominated for so many awards. I don’t see how any of these won’t be considered classics in the decades to come.

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@87 Diana –
Point is, don’t cry for teens — they are getting PLENTY of great spec stuff!

Are they? Sure, they’re getting _some_ stuff that is great and will be classics (Westerfeld/Doctorow, etc), but are they going to learn the same things as they would reading RAH’s Moon is a Harsh Mistress or Starship Troopers (I don’t know if these are considered juveniles or not – I suspect not – but that’s how old I was when I read them :). You can only have so many teen romance vampire stories before they tend to blur into an indistinct mass, and telling a romantic story aimed at teens, no matter how well done, is unlikely to teach some of the same things as reading a RAH book would. I’m probably just getting crochety, though. Reading things like Clark’s Childhoold’s End also had a pretty big impression on my 13-year-old self, so don’t mistake my enthusiasm for RAH as excluding any of the other masters of that era. They had a certain something.

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@95 Hope –

I quite agree, and that’s what I’d been thinking more as this conversation went on. My point seems unprovable until someone decides to reprint RAH and RAH-like material and market it towards today’s youth. That ain’t gonna happen, though I did note with some glee yesterday that the local bookchain has some newly (2009) prints of E.E. Doc Smith’s Lensman books on the shelves. Right on. Hopefully they’ll go on to reprint some of his more obscure series (Skylark, etc), and perhaps some more obscure authors (Lin Carter, etc.). There’s an amazing amount of fun stuff out there that will likely never see the light of day otherwise.