I’ve just finished an advance review copy of The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens, the first installment of a new anthology series edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Jane Yolen. This is an idea whose time has well and truly come: the editors pick stories that are suitable for teens from among the general selection of all the fantasy and science fiction published in the last year.
There’s an old bon mot about science fiction: “the golden age of science fiction is 12.” When I was about that age, I was haunting my local science fiction bookstore and library, reading everything a could get my hands on, a book every day or sometimes more. Those formative years made me into a lifelong reader of science fiction — and a lifelong customer for science fiction writers.
But as anyone who attends science fiction conventions knows, fandom is aging without any especially large cohort of adolescents coming in behind it. Young people are still thoroughly engaged with sf, but it’s through gaming, comics, and TV/films. All worthy endeavors, but to the extent that they’re crowding out novels and stories, it’s bad news for those of us who write sf — and those of us who read it, since publishers won’t be able to publish to the dwindling niche of genre readers forever; eventually we’ll cross over into a market too small to serve.
And that’s why this anthology (and New Skies and New Magics, two anthologies of sf and fantasy for kids edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden) is so important. It’s not that the field lacks work that’s appropriate for young people; it positively bursts with it. And as Yolen notes in her introduction, the precocious youngsters who come to sf are not easily intimidated by the notion that they are reading books intended for adult readers. But it’s not enough: for those professionals and parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and mentors looking to introduce their young friends to the field, it is hard to find the good stuff that will get them started and hook them for life (Jumper and its sequel Reflex, which I reviewed here earlier this month, are good choices for this task).
In creating and sustaining a new series of books that consistently identify quality, age-appropriate science fiction and fantasy, Yolen and Nielsen Hayden are doing important work — providing a road-map for newcomers to the field, and a friend that they can visit with every year. What’s more, the introduction to each story includes a suggested reading list of sf and fantasy novels of note that you should read if you like the story.
The stories in this anthology range from good to brilliant to jaw-dropping. It is relatively short on science fiction, but the main sf piece, Bradley Denton’s “Sergeant Chip” is so good that it practically had me in tears on the bus this morning (no surprise, as Denton is one of the field’s towering and under-appreciated geniuses, whose Buddy Holly is a Alive and Well on Ganymede is possibly the funniest book I’ve ever read). Sergeant Chip is the first-person narrative of an electronically enhanced dog serving in the K9 forces of an American military unit occupying a conquered country that is much like Iraq of today.
Many of the other standouts here are “contemporary fantasies,” set in the modern world, American interpretations of magic realism, a favorite genre of mine. Kelly Link’s “Faery Handbag” and Delia Sherman’s “CATNYP” are the best examples here.
As to the rest, they are a taster’s menu of well-executed, broadly chosen stories from every corner of the field, from heroic fantasy to straight-ahead science fiction to high fantasy. Brilliantly, the editors have also included Rudyard Kipling’s 1904 story “They” — and they promise that each edition of the anthology henceforth will include one century-old story from the annals of history.
The book should be appearing on shelves any day now — it has a May pub-date which usually means that it starts appearing in April. If you have a young person in your life whom you want to introduce to a field that will teach her or him the most important lessons the world has to present; or if you are looking to reconnect with the field after neglecting the short story magazines and anthologies, then this book is the one for you.