The SFSignal posted an article today about the lack of superheroes in YA by YA author KD McEntire:

Why is it that, with all this room for self-expression, with all this space for examining the nooks and crannies of the human (and non-human) condition alike, that you hardly ever see a single Young Adult title sporting a spandex-clad super human? Why are the epic battles that could be spun out between super-powered beings confined to the realm of sexy vampires and sultry witches? Do we really believe that the origin stories of your friendly neighborhood Captain Amazo and Doctor Dreadful are best only told in pretty pictures that can only give the reader a glimpse of the reasoning behind the character’s actions? [...]what gives? Why are there hardly any heroes of the super-persuasion bounding around the YA section?

I have to admit that I read that and saw red. This isn’t the first blog post I’ve seen bemoaning the supposedly fae-and-vamp-ridden world of genre lit for teens. In fact, it’s the second post the Signal’s published in the last month on the topic. October saw indie author Simon Haynes complaining that there’s no sci-fi out there for middle grade readers–though of course he defines sci-fi very narrowly:

I’ve been looking for distant future, realistic (even hard) science, with a bit of comedy to lighten things up. Not Jimmy Neutron, but Tintin’s Destination Moon/Explorers on the Moon or William F. Temple’s Martin Magnus Planet Rover – with young protagonists. Middle-grade for readers 9+, not YA and definitely not dystopian. Fun, entertaining and educational.

These authors aren’t alone, of course. I’ve heard stories–too many stories. Like the one about the YA-ignorant genre writer who, on a con panel, recommended Heinlein juveniles as the best SF works available for modern teens.

Heinlein juveniles. For modern teens.

These authors always have theories about why YA is the way that it is. Maybe teens don’t care about science anymore. Maybe Twilight warped their brains. There’s always a lot of blame placed on publishers, who supposedly think that sparkly vampire boys are the only things that sell.

But what these authors don’t seem to see is that they’re wrong about the state of genre YA. Dead wrong.

I'll say this much: the covers have improved since 2009.

I empathize with them somewhat, actually. Back in 2008 and 2009 when I first got into writing YA, I complained about the same thing. Where was all the sci-fi of yore?! Why weren’t teens reading Animorphs, like I did? Of course, back then the market was different. But even then, I have to admit that I was seeing the shelves through my own warped, limited view. By what measure were books like Alison Goodman’s Singing the Dogstar Blues, Anne Osterlund’s Academy 7, Nancy Farmer’s House of the Scorpion, or even the friggin’ Hunger Games not sci-fi?

And today the bookstore is brighter than ever for teen fans of science fiction. I know that for a fact thanks to the Intergalactic Academy–every month, Sean and I have to winnow down our review list to something manageable. We could easily post twice the number of reviews and still have ARCs left over. Sure, the genre looks different than it did back in Heinlein’s day. I’d venture to guess that this has more to do with the fact that we as a society have mightily changed. Without the space race, and the limitless optimism of the ’50s, most sci-fi’s taken a darker turn, not just YA. But it doesn’t mean that what YA authors are writing–and what YA readers are inhaling–isn’t science fiction.

For the MG science fiction fan, contrary to what Mr. Haynes writes, there’s Circus Galacticus by Deva Fagan, Jacob Wonderbar and the Cosmic Space Kapow by Nathan Bransford, The Boy at the End of the World by Greg van Eekhout, and Stuck on Earth by David Klass, for a start. And that’s ignoring the host of dystopian and poc-apocalyptic titles which–yes, really–are still science fiction.

For YA readers who want some superhero action, there’s Hero by Mike Lupica (not to be confused with the also appropriate Hero by Perry Moore), The Rise of Renegade X by Chelsea Campbell, The Lab by Jack Heath, Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi and the Quantum Prophesy books by Michael Carroll. Of course, fans of action-packed YA have plenty to choose from these days, from Veronica Roth’s Divergent to Marie Lu’s Legend to, of course, the Hunger Games (significant, I think, is that all three of these last series have cross-gender appeal, but are written by women and feature strong female protagonists. So much for girls not getting into the action game!).

Those who complain about how all YA sci-fi is cookie-cutter dystopians do so at the risk of ignoring popular YA space operas: the recently concluded Seed Trilogy by Pamela Sargent, Beth Revis’ best-selling Across the Universe, Amy Kathleen Ryan’s Glow. We’ve even got sociological sci-fi in YA, in the form of Karen Sandler’s Tankborn.

And that’s just scratching the surface of what’s out there–not to mention what’s to come. For SF fans, the YA lists of most publishers for 2012 and 2013 look promising, indeed.

I’m not going to pretend that genre YA is perfect–these titles could always use more press to get them into the hands of the readers who want them. So instead of wasting our breath complaining about a non-existent lack, how about we do what we can to help, by reading all the really great science fiction that’s already out there, and talking it up to the teens who will love it?

Spoilers. Clearly. Also long and ranty. Probably also clearly.

I’m upset with Doctor Who. I wish I could say that this is solely for apolitical reasons. Oh, they figure into it. I think the storytelling lately has been painfully contrived and the plotlines largely don’t stand up to Fridge Scrutiny and why was Mels so awkwardly retconned into a show that’s usually so fantastic about continuity and why have River even regenerate if you’re only going to let her use that power once or twice and why tell the audience you’re going to kill Hitler then just leave him locked in a closet and does anyone really think the Doctor staring at screens over and over again is all that ominous? These things bother me. But I’m also bothered by the way River Song has been becoming less and less awesome, to the point now where she only became an archaeologist because she was ISO a “good man” (WTF? I guess we should count our blessings that she’s not a “PhT” as in “Putting Hubby Through”) and have been increasingly frustrated with Amy, too. So I can’t really deny it; I’m disappointed in Doctor Who as a woman, a feminist. I thought it was an awesome feminist show, and now I’m beginning to suspect that it’s not, and that makes me sad.

When Steven Moffat began his stint as show-runner, I was very, very optimistic. Like every other viewer of Doctor Who, I loved “Blink” and “The Girl in the Fireplace” and “Silence in the Library”/”Forest of the Dead.” In fact, I was particularly psyched about the introduction of River Song, a time traveler traveling in the reverse of the Doctor who seemed perhaps to be his equal romantically and intellectually. After several seasons of women pining after the Doctor–and one with a woman who didn’t, but who who had all of her character growth erased by the end of her run–I was ready for some wonderful, complex, capable ladies.*

Amelia I loooooove you.

And in the beginning, Moffat gave us one very promising girl: young Amelia Pond, adventurous, skeptical, brilliant.

And then Amelia grew up. And then Amelia became Amy.

For a long time, I clung to my optimism. After all, Amy looked awesome. And she was . . . impulsive! But I ignored the niggling feeling I had that I didn’t really know Amy. Because Amy was Amelia! And she looked awesome!  And she was . . . impulsive!

These concerns grew, unnamed, as I watched certain features of Amy develop. Namely, her passivity. She’s led blindly through a forest. She’s told that she must be “straightened out” to marry Rory by the Doctor. She’s locked in a box and guarded for two thousand years by her fiance. Hmm.

Sorry, Amy. I tried.

It took me a long time to finally pinpoint this discomfort. It wasn’t until we discovered that she’d been trapped and pregnant for half a season and was waiting for Rory and the Doctor to save her that I realized what it was: other than Amy’s propensity for getting herself into trouble, I felt like I had no sense of who she was at all.

I could go on about this, but this post by Lindsay Miller from Tigerbeatdown pretty much covers all of my thoughts about why Amy is a problematic character. On the rare occasions that she does save the day, she generally does it by thinking about a dude. Much more frequently, she’s a flighty damsel. Though we’re told that she’s the same person as Amelia, a bossy, demonstrably artistic, adventurous little girl, this isn’t often reflected in the woman she became. I’d say that she was sassy or adventurous, too, but these traits are treated like a bit of a joke by the men she travels with, her husband, and the Doctor, and so it’s not really very satisfying for me to watch, as a woman who was hoping explicitly for some awesome ladies.

This week’s episode, “The Girl Who Waited,” kind of got my hopes up. In it, Amy is stuck in different timestream from Rory and the Doctor. And it seems that in the time between her getting stuck, and her getting rescued–thirty-six years!–she does not just wait passively.

In fact, she becomes completely bad ass.

Eschewing the romantic ideal of just waiting for her man, she instead learns to battle her robot attackers. She grows as a warrior, and as an intellectual–she reprograms one robot and renames it after her husband; she builds a sonic screwdriver; she determines the rules of her world and then bends them to her will. She’s not happy, surely (she calls her life “hell”) but, God, she’s totally awesome.

I would love to cosplay Older!Amy. She’s the kind of lady for me–the kind of woman you could totally imagine little Amelia Pond growing into.

When she’s discovered by Rory and the Doctor, they find that she’s no longer so fond of the Doctor. In fact, she refers to him as a “raggedy man” and “the voice of God” and seems very ticked off about all of this waiting to be saved and waiting generally. Hey! Anger at being ditched! That’s not a response we’ve seen from Amy before–but definitely one that makes sense, given what little we know about her character.

We see Older!Amy wrestling with the return of her husband. Should she put on make-up or not? Should she open herself up to him, or is it too late for that? Then they share a laugh, and it seems that Amy makes a decision. When the Doctor suggests that they rescue Amy from her past, rewriting her out of existence, she says no–quite clearly and definitively:

He wants to rescue past me from thirty-six years back which means I cease to exist. Everything I’ve seen and done dissolves. Time is rewritten . . .. I’ll die, and another Amy will take my place, an Amy who never got trapped in two streams, an Amy who grew old with you, and she, in thirty six years, won’t be me . . .. Take me with you. You came to rescue me, so rescue me.

But her husband’s very first response to the discovery of Older!Amy–before they ever discuss, you know, saving her–is that he and the Doctor need to go back in time and stop her isolation from ever happening. Even after Amy’s impassioned advocacy for her own continued existence, the Doctor and Rory both insist that her isolation is “wrong.” Rory brings up the fact that he promised to protect her; apparently his guilt is worth more than Amy’s desire to continue existing. Younger!Amy is referred to as “our” Amy. Really, to these two men, there’s no choice between which woman is worth saving. No matter how much the woman who lived through these experiences wants to survive (to go travel, perhaps, through the universe), the younger woman must win.

It’s interesting to see how this plays out with Rory. He seems to feel some genuine conflict, though he’s disgusted, perhaps, that such an old woman (“Old enough to be my mother!” he exclaims in apparent disgust) would flirt with him–which I find odd for a series which has featured several romances between a 900-year-old man and various twenty-something women and since Rory himself has 2,000 years of life experience on his wife, albeit as a plastic Roman Centurion. This experience roughly parallels what Amy experiences in the Two Streams quarantine facility, ironically–but it’s yet to be suggested, even a season later, that Rory be “spared” this experience. It’s tragic, yes; it’s also irrefutably a part of who he is.

Early in the episode,  the Doctor says of the other inhabitants of the quarantine facility: “I think they’re happy to be alive. Better than the alternative.” Older!Amy’s actions are consistent with this. Even when she agrees to save her younger self (during a genuinely stirring and very well-acted scene) because of her love of her husband, she insists that she be taken along, too. She wants to survive, desperately, fiercely. The Doctor seems to realize that this will of hers to live is the only way to convince her to save her younger self. And because he’s never truly considered saving the old version of her, he lies. He tells Older!Amy that she has a chance of surviving so that she’ll help save her young doppelganger. Then, when she comes to board the TARDIS, he slams the door in her face. It’s only when the truth becomes apparent that she nobly sacrifices herself, but by then the choice isn’t simply between her survival, or the survival of her younger self, but rather between their mutual death or the survival of her younger self.

So much for respecting a woman’s right to choose. Every single aspect of this plot and every action of the Doctor conspire to invalidate Older!Amy’s choices, desires, and personhood. What matters is that she be spared, even if she doesn’t want to be spared–because the men, of course, know better than she do about her very life.

In this episode, the Doctor acts in a way that’s in keeping with his recent behavior, but is still insanely maddening. He’s paternalistic. He’s condescending. He lies. He rejects Amy’s right and autonomy over her experiences outright.

Younger!Amy and Rory’s actions aren’t much better. Near the end of the episode, despite the fact that we both have seen and been told that Amy already knows how to disable the robots via feedback, Younger!Amy is almost instantly incapacitated. Then she’s carried, unconscious, in Rory’s arms onto the TARDIS.

It’s only Older!Amy who is anything new. This is the first time we’ve seen concrete, verifiable growth in Amy-Pond-the-adult. It’s also the first time it’s been suggested that she’s a certifiable genius. Karen Gillan is able to stretch her acting chops like never before. She fights. She invents. She hacks. She flirts. Despite the fact that she’s been hurt, she’s still indisputably a whole, capable person–in precisely the way that our Amy has never been.

I wouldn’t be surprised if you don’t agree with me, Gentle Reader. I’ve fought on metafilter about this already. My husband thinks I’m imaging things. I honestly think it’s difficult to recognize these aspects of “The Girl Who Waited” because this episode was so much better written than what we’ve seen recently. Other than a bit of idiot plotting at the beginning, and a reliance on a giant magnifying glass as a plot point throughout, the script and dialog feels sounder than most of what we’ve seen this season. But Amy’s storyline is really more of the same. The woman has to be saved. Worse, the woman doesn’t really know what’s good for her–to the point where she has to be manipulated and tricked into making the right decision.

I understand television’s need to protect the status quo. But Rory has been allowed to grow, from passive near-cuckold into a hero. In previous seasons, Donna, Martha, and Rose all underwent very palpable growth as their experiences changed their goals, lives, and desires (even if Donna was pretty much royally screwed over in the end). Now that I’ve had a more concrete vision of what Amy could be dangled in front of me–and then snatched away by male characters and writers who say they know better–damn it, I want a sign of that woman on the actual show. I want some sign that Amy can grow into a brilliant, kick ass person even as she stands by her husband’s side.

Because otherwise? If Amy stays as she is today–if the show continues to value damselship over competence, raw youth over experience, passivity over self-sufficiency–if Amy is always the problem and almost never the solution?

Then I’m done.

*On first viewing, I did not much like Rose, and while I highly respected Martha, I felt that the conclusion of Donna’s plotline diminished her. I still think Donna got screwed, but I now appreciate the previous companions much more as strongly drawn ladies with clearly defined motivations. Especially in comparison with Amy. Ugh.

Hi, guys! I’m editing.

If you're anything like me, you will zoom in on this image to try and read the text. Because you are nosy. 'scool.

I just looked at the clock and realized it was almost midnight and I hadn’t written a blog post yet. I could write about slashing and burning my book, but that’s boring. Really–talking about editing? Snooze. What works for me isn’t likely to work for you, anyway.

But I was just listening in a bit to someone’s twitter conversation, and it seemed to be ripe fodder for a post, because it’s something that’s been on my mind a lot. They were talking about Across the Universe by Beth Revis, and how they think it’s not really sci-fi.

Hmm.

I’ve encountered this sort of argument before, but it seems to be a recent one in YA. I’m used to arguing genre with literary types, who want to proclaim that any book that’s good couldn’t possibly be science fiction, even if it has, like, talking squids in space. But this argument is different. It’s not precisely the same sort of qualitative argument–these parties are likely to argue, in fact, that certain YA genre books are not, in fact, science fiction because they don’t think they’re particularly good science fiction.

I’ve heard arguments that those writing YA dystopian novels are just opportunistic phonies riding a trend wave toward fame. They think it’s clear that the writers in question Have Not Done Their Research because they can find world building flaws or because they’ve seen certain tropes before. And I’ll admit, I’ve been annoyed by the shoddy world building in certain books, or found aspects implausible (I’m looking at you, Delirium). I even kinda didn’t like some of these books.

But I’m still fine with calling them sci-fi.

Because of these aforementioned arguments with literary types about genre, I generally subscribe to what I like to call the “Calling a Utopia a Utopia” system of labeling sci-fi. Basically, if a work has any of the tropes commonly recognized as science fictional, it’s sci-fi. Aliens? Sci-fi. Spaceships? Sci-fi. Genetic engineering? Sci-fi. Apocalypses? Sci-fi.

I think this works two ways: it avoids weasely arguments that only define as science fictional works that suck, and it brings genre definitions more in line with the common sense way that most readers–both mainstream, and genre–actually interact with books and television. Because, you know, when my mom says she loves sci-fi she doesn’t mean only hard sci-fi where every aspect of the world building is perfectly considered (in fact, she mostly means B-movies on the SyFy channel), and when my friend says she hates it, she mostly means Star Trek leaves her cold.

Anyway, the reason this all troubles me, and quite a bit, at times, is that I’m a big sci-fi nerd. I’ve been searching for YA science fiction for years, and mostly came up completely empty until recently. And so, while I haven’t loved every sci-fi or dystopian release, I’ve been really happy to see some sort of push in publishing for the type of books that I love. For the first time, there might be room at the cool kids’ table for a dork like me.

And this dork isn’t a terribly huge hard SF fan. In fact, I really wonder if the soft science fiction that I’ve been reading since I was twelve–Katie Waitman or Megan Lindholm or Anne McCaffrey or Elizabeth Moon or Sherri S. Tepper–would pass muster with a lot of these objectors if these writers didn’t have tradition on their side. Because some of their world building is occasionally holey. Because sometimes the SF is used as atmospheric window dressing for a character-driven story. Because sometimes their books are a bit cliche, like psychic soulmates and effortless FTL travel and stuff

We have a term for this guys. It’s not “not science fiction.” It’s soft sci-fi (and it’s awesome).

Of course this is personal, too. I’ll tell you: I’ve done my homework. I always bristle when people are ignorant about the genre they’re writing in, but I’ve read every piece of YA space opera I’ve been able to get my hands on. I have an adolescence spent reading Frederick Pohl and a young adulthood spent reading Octavia Butler behind me. But the science fiction in Daughter of Earth isn’t perfect (though I’ve worked hard to make it work), and I can’t really pretend that I coined the term generation ship or anything like that. And I worry that my credentials are going to be held up to the light and judged and, feh, you know what? I love stuff like Alien Nation and Star Trek even when they are filled with rubber forehead aliens, because they thrill me. I just love all that spacey, alienish stuff.

And I don’t feel like I’m in any position to judge whether another speculative author deserves to sit with me under a genre umbrella or not (even if I might not like particular books etc. etc.). I’m just glad, really glad, that people are reading and writing books in the genre that I care about–and honestly, if you love sci-fi, I think you should be, too. Because even if the sci-fi books that are out now aren’t working for you, they represent a shift in publishing, a shift toward an environment where young adult sci-fi has a chance to find an audience for once, and that creates the possibility of harder SF being accepted, too, whereas once it was all sparkly vampires. It’s an exciting time to be a nerd.

I guess what I’m saying is, viva la (imperfect, implausible) spaceships.

Three days after the LOST finale, the smoke is beginning to clear. My own rage over the direction that the finale took us is starting to subside. While I could focus on the bits that made me most angry initially—the hackneyed, soft-focus reunions that weren’t true to some of the characters (Shannon and Sayid? Really?); the incomprehensible, slap-dash pacing and plotting (how many times does Ben Linus have to switch sides?); the small, niggling inconsistencies raised in the last ten minutes (if Unitarian-Church-Purgatory is a place without time, how can someone stay there “for awhile”?), I won’t. Other people can discuss those things, and probably more thoroughly and better than I.

Instead, what I want to focus on is what’s proven to be LOST’s overarching theme: the battle between faith and skepticism. Because, though the writers didn’t offer us many answers in the two and a half hour finale, they did offer us one: that the search for answers at all is in vain. That faith rules and science, well, drools.
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