SF for Teens and Academic Publishing

I just finished THE INTER-GALACTIC PLAYGROUND (McFarland, 2009), a book by Farah Mendlesohn on science fiction for children and teenagers. She has a lively, highly readable style, not something one can take for granted in academic writing. I enjoyed this study much more than, for example, a book published a couple of years ago on teen vampire fiction. That book, to my disappointment, wasn’t an overview of the subgenre but a narrowly focused discussion of a few novels that the author considered representative of various trends in YA vampire fiction. In effect, her selection bias dominated the work. Mendlesohn’s INTER-GALACTIC PLAYGROUND, in contrast, relies on her reading of over 400 novels as well as a reader survey she conducted. I got the impression that her strong opinions are based on a deep and broad knowledge of the field and a genuine love for it. No surprise there, since I’ve heard her speak several times at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, and she’s always fascinating to listen to even when I disagree with her.

One of her major premises is that the “juveniles” of the 1950s and earlier are not equivalent to the “YA” fiction of more recent decades. The crucial difference she sees is that earlier novels such as Heinlein’s and Norton’s focused on gaining knowledge, exploring, moving from home outward to the world of adult work, and accomplishing significant things. More recent SF novels for children and youth tend to focus on interpersonal relationships (on the dubious grounds, refuted by reader statements and the author’s own observation, that all teenagers want to read “issue” books about characters like themselves) rather than the actual science of science fiction. Not that both elements don’t exist in fiction at all periods, but the emphasis, she maintains, has changed. Her examples seem to support this thesis. Since almost all my reading of recent YA fiction has been in fantasy rather than SF, I didn’t notice that phenomenon until this book pointed it out. Mendlesohn doesn’t condemn relationship-oriented and home-oriented fiction as such, but she’s concerned that it doesn’t provide a “gateway” into adult science fiction the way the SF of earlier-generation writers did. In other words, young readers who like the current YA speculative fiction won’t necessarily like contemporary adult SF, since the themes and plots are so different.

Along the way, Mendlesohn questions the “boys don’t read” truism—partly on the grounds that, for the people who make public statements on such issues, the kinds of things boys like to read (e.g., genre fiction, media tie-ins, and nonfiction, and I would add graphic novels) “don’t count”—and the assumption that children aren’t a “market” because their reading experiences are supposedly under the control of parents and teachers. She challenges the dominant pedagogical cliches that children can't handle narrative complexity, don't like didactic fiction, and want "relevance" and "books about people like them." She also discusses the Reading Child, the kind of reader most of us probably were while growing up, the “extreme sport” book lover who devours the printed word constantly—a type generally ignored in studies of children's reading habits. MUCH to ponder in this book, and I’d recommend it wholeheartedly if it weren’t priced at something like $45.00 on Amazon.com. For a trade paperback—the rule rather than the exception for scholarly publications. If the subject interests you at all, try to borrow this monograph through interlibrary loan, the way I did.

The cost brings up another ponder-worthy point, which makes me gnash my teeth and scream at the monitor almost every time I search out a cool-sounding work of literary criticism on Amazon.com: Don’t these publishers WANT anyone to buy their books? Are they really content to sell only to libraries and those few academic specialists for whom a particular work is so central to their field that they have no choice but to fork over the exorbitant price to own it? Admittedly, I’m an author, not a publisher, and my only direct experience with academic presses has through been my own three overpriced scholarly books. However, I’ve had lots of nice-looking trade paperbacks of my novels released by my e-publishers through print-on-demand technology, priced at $16.00 or less, like most trade paperbacks in the chain bookstores. If the Internet equivalent of a small press, operating on a very thin budget, can produce a POD book at an affordable price, why can’t a university press even come close? I’m willing to believe editors and proofreaders at university presses and other scholarly publishers are paid more than their counterparts at e-pubs (almost anybody would be), but THAT much more? And, yes, academic books have end notes and indices, but that’s just a matter of using the right word processing software, isn’t it? Are academic presses so mired in the practices of the past that they can’t make efficient use of new technology, or is there some other factor I’m missing?

They produce short print runs on the assumption that only a few specialists will want the books enough to pay the high prices and that most copies will be sold to libraries. The short print runs (apparently—see above Re POD) lead to high prices per copy, producing a self-fulfilling prophecy, because of course nobody except libraries can afford to buy them. (And libraries' budgets are being cut.) Every year a few lit-crit books come out that I WOULD buy if they weren’t priced so ridiculously. Not to mention my own two vampire-related out-of-print books still being offered in POD editions at costs so astronomical that I’m always surprised my annual royalty statement shows two or three copies sold each year. I’d love to have them available in a form people could afford. Aargh. (No, I can’t take back the rights and reissue them myself. They were published so long ago that I don’t have the files in usable form anymore, if at all. Also, one is an anthology of articles by other people. I wish I COULD do that with my other book from that same publisher, which was my dissertation; I made what turned out to be the unwise decision of selling it to a different academic press when the original publisher switched to POD only, and I’ve never received a single check from the second publisher. They’re offering the book at something like $99.00.)

We’ve often discussed the Fiction Delivery System here. But there are also problems with the Nonfiction Delivery System, especially in academia. The required publication credits for tenure keep escalating while the available publishing outlets, for economic reasons, keep shrinking. What’s the answer? E-books? As an e-published author, I’m an enthusiastic proponent of electronic publishing as a response to niche markets, such as the tiny number of readers who might want a narrowly focused monograph on some specialized topic, yet those few people want that work very, very much. Or will there be a future solution nobody has thought of yet?

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt