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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Kids fantasy/SF vs adults fantasy/SF

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10:29 / 19.11.01

I know the boundary is blurring, with every adult in the universe reading Harry Potter and His Dark Materials (oh, oh, can we pleeeeeeease not spoil for the HDM trilogy on this thread - I haven't read the last book yet but hope to some time in the next week or so).

However, I went off fantasy & SF when I hit about thirteen and started making the switch from kids' books (Nicholas Fisk, Diana Wynne Jones, Sylvia Enghdahl) to adults' (Aldiss, Asimov, etc: I may have been unlucky, since I've recently got into Marge Piercy and Philip K Dick and like them immensely).

It seems to me that adults' fantasy/SF is much more likely to be misogynistic and heterocentric. Is this because dealing with "sex" as an issue in society leads to heavy-handed (and often, in my view, reactionary) allegory? I see kids' fantasy/SF as far queerer - partly, I suspect, because adult m/f relationships are less likely to be a focus.

I accept that my sample here is skewed, and I may just be talking about "why Diana Wynne Jones is better than Isaac Asimov" (though I like her marketed-for-adults novels far less than the marketed-for-children ones). Anyone have any thoughts?

11:27 / 19.11.01

quote:Originally posted by Deva:
I see kids' fantasy/SF as far queerer - partly, I suspect, because adult m/f relationships are less likely to be a focus.

I think you are right about this. A lot of adult SF seems to me to be about shiny metallic technology and shiny metallic 'babe'-type women as well. Whether this is because it is a hetero-male-dominated genre or not, I don't know. As for fantasy - swords/dragons and women in floaty dresses.

But this may happen because children's books of all sorts are often based around various rites of passage, whereas in adult SF/fantasy the adults have already gone through that and the books are less about character development than shiny metallic dragons. Adult SF/fantasy chracters often seem ot me to be ciphers and to be acknowledged as such by the authors.

Also children probably have less rigid expectations, and can be less easily stereotyped into 'audiences' for genres. Well, perhaps...

We're The Great Old Ones Now

11:31 / 19.11.01

I think you were unlucky, to be honest. Or that you went about making the shift rather dramatically - Aldiss and Asimov aren't really much of a progression from Diana Wynne Jones.

HDM - no spoilers - I find interesting and enjoyable, but ultimately rather depressing. The heavy influx of Christian thinking (albeit pretty thoroughly knocked about) rather threw me, too. I never quite got got it straight in my head which side I was supposed to be on.

I think you might be right about kids' stuff tending to be more ambiguous and often more intelligent (if discreetly) about sex than 'grown up' fiction - I have a peculiar hatred for the supposedly emancipated SF that was flying around for a while, and which inevitably involved rape and castration and what all else as a way of 'exploring gender'.

Whoop-dee-doo.

Peter F. Hamilton seems to have some very dark sexual places in his head. Almost all of his stories have some kind of monstro-sexual encounter.

I've sort of run out of things to say. I'm wondering whether SF is a good arena for exploring sex and gender at all. I'm thinking about Iain M. Banks and his wonderful Culture universe and the occasional dip into sexual ick which I tend to auto-edit in my head.

Anyone? I'm too scatty right now for this.

Regrettable Juvenilia

12:14 / 19.11.01

Dark Materials and gender is an interesting one, of course, because of people's daemons - there's an interesting bit in the first book where people are mentioned who have daemons the same sex as themselves, which is considered a bit odd. I couldn't work out whether or not this was a slightly awkward metaphor for homosexuality or not...

Slight tangent

- and vague, vague spoilers for The Subtle Knife -

I was quite amazed that Pullman got away with the scene near the end with the monkey and the snake... I imagine if I'd been 12 and read that, I'd have wondered what the strange tingly feeling in my belly was...

I'm dying to have a proper discussion with Nick and others about the trilogy, and the handling of Christian ideas especially, but I need to finish the third one first... Have to say though that so far I don't think it jars, or that it's particularly hard to swallow - no more so, and a freshing change from, say, C.S. Lewis' Narnia books in general and The Last Battle in particular. And surely presenting a situation in which you're not sure which side you're supposed to be on might be a good thing... There's quite a lot of moral complexity there, but it's quite accessibly presented. I find it rather Invisibles-esque, actually.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

10:09 / 21.11.01

quote:Originally posted by Kit-Cat Club:
Also children probably have less rigid expectations, and can be less easily stereotyped into 'audiences' for genres. Well, perhaps...

Ooh, now *that's* interesting. I wonder whether this is why I don't like Harry Potter as much as other kids' fantasy - it seems to me to be written for "children" as a market, rather than using 'for children' as an opening onto all sorts of less categorized ways of seeing the world - including, but not limited to, sexual dimorphism/heterosexuality... Rowling seems to relish narrowing the possibilities of her world thru stacking up generic templates in a fairly un-playful way (boarding school, quest narratives, orphan fantasies, etc).

Nick, you're right that I was unlucky: come on, tell me about some crap children's books and some great adults' ones that confound my generalizations.

Narnia, of course, completely does away with my ill-thought-through sense that adult fantasy/SF (can I just say 'SF' for 'speculative fiction', please, it's shorter) is more likely to be heavily allegorical than kids'. But the allegory there is transcendental - about good and evil, rather than about specific societal forms: along the way it naturalizes some of the less progressive aspects of Christian belief, of course, but it's annoying in a different way from, eg, the assumption in 'The Left Hand of Darkness' that gender is only intelligible within a frame of heterosexual complementarity...

10:22 / 21.11.01

quote:Originally posted by Deva:

Rowling seems to relish narrowing the possibilities of her world thru stacking up generic templates in a fairly un-playful way (boarding school, quest narratives, orphan fantasies, etc).

I think her use of the boarding school is quite interesting in that it is a co-educational school that in all other respects conforms to other stereotypes of the 'boarding school' genre. This seems to make it, if anything, even more heteronormative - in school stories which deal with single-sex schools there seems to me to be (paradoxically) far more scope for queering boundaries, as girls and boys take on characteristics which are associated with gender to express a wider range of character types - it's a lazy shorthand way of doing this, of course.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

11:12 / 21.11.01

quote:But the allegory there is transcendental - about good and evil, rather than about specific societal formsI think that's where we part company - I see Harry Potter in the same way...I'm not sure the distinction is real. But you'd have to expand on it before I could be sure...

Incidentally, in defense of Rowling (which I don't really want to pursue here), her political setup is rather interesting: the Ministry of Magic is distinctly John Major's government-esque: there's a desire to avoid scandal, not to talk about hard issues; they trade favours and in-fight - even in the face of obvious evil.

And the discrimination against magical races (eg. the giants, not the ghastly bloody house-elf sub-plot) which even fairly close allies of Harry show is not exactly average kids' stuff.

I take the point about the middle-of-the-road setup, but I'm not sure that it isn't more subtly dissonant than you give credit for.

[ 21-11-2001: Message edited by: Nick ]

17:40 / 21.11.01

Nick: yeah, I was being lazy about Narnia, and kind of hoping someone else would come up with something brilliant. I guess the comparison with The Left Hand of Darkness is just that TLHOD sets out to be "about" sex/gender in a way that Narnia doesn't, though the Narnia books certainly contain messages about the proper ordering of sex & gender along the way - and which approach is more pernicious is a whole nother question. But there's very little kidfic I've read that explicitly takes on specific political questions around social organization (though Jean Ure's 'Come Lucky April' does exactly that) - it tends to use archetype (good/evil, white witch/lion, evil betrayer/Wise Man), rather than allegory, if I might set up a straw binary for the moment.

Kit-Cat... ooh, yes, that's a really interesting way of thinking about single-sex-school-stories. I tend to be a bit more lenient towards them (because I like them so much): it may be a lazy way of creating character templates, but I really *enjoy* the range of gender across same-sex spreads that results. As you say, co-ed set-ups become much more heteronormative, since the heavy hand of the gender binary falls on our heroes and heroines and sorts them into complementary ways of acting/being in relation to each other... when there are no boys around, female characters are far less called upon to represent "Girl"/"Woman".

17:55 / 21.11.01

[deep deep breath]

will now plug my favorite living prose writer in the world...

Deva, I reccomend Geoff Ryman.

20:13 / 21.11.01

Hmn. Ryman's OK. I enjoyed 253 a LOT. Lust looked only OK at best, but if you like Gender you'll enjoy it.

We must have an HDM bookclub thread, I reckon, given what people want to discuss. I loved it. Read the last half of book 3 by candlelight in a powercut... it really was magic to me, almost had me in tears for no dsicernable reason.

A LOT of your questions might be answered in Book3, or the angles you're meant to take will be clearer, anyhow. We'll talk when you're done...

06:40 / 22.11.01

quote:Originally posted by Nick:
You mean Geoff 'The Warrior Who Carried Life' Ryman? Prince of the castration sequence? Grand High Wuppahwup of artful and symmetrical gender violence?

I was about to ask whether he wrote kidfic or adultfic, but I suspect this answers my question. Will see if they have any in the library next time I go.

06:40 / 22.11.01

We can have an HDM thread when Deva and Flyboy have finished the trilogy, or now, with heavy spoilers I suppose...

Deva: yes, exactly, c.f. Bill and Clarissa/ Jo Bettany in the early Chalet books (not the later ones when she becomes a twin-producing machine). The same thing is true of boys' school stories; not just Eric, or Little by Little but ones written in the Edwardian period like The Hill, The Loom of Youth, David Blaize etc etc - all focussing to a great extent on homosocial friendships in which there is a variety of gendering including less hetero-masculine types (interestingly the hero often takes such a role - 'bloods' are definitely not portrayed as the most desirable boys).

Back to fantasy - it's interesting that the protagonists of children's fantasy books written by women are very often male. Why is this?

ONLY NICE THINGS

06:40 / 22.11.01

Possibly because most children's fantasy follows the form of a bildungsroman, in which the passage into manhood, through deeds, is required?

On Ryman - his SF is probably aimed at adults, and is also not that good. "Lust" is getting the big pops, but is not enticing me. "253" was good, as was "Was", a multi-level meditation on AIDS, horror movies and the Wizard of Oz, which might just about be considered a fantasy.

06:40 / 22.11.01

quote:Originally posted by The Haus of I.Ds:
Possibly because most children's fantasy follows the form of a bildungsroman, in which the passage into manhood, through deeds, is required?

You could well be right. Perhaps female rites of passage are focussed on physical changes (the only book I can think of at the moment that is focussed on menstruation - for example - is Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret) - not conducive to derring-do.

But it is possible to write a rites-of-passage derring-do fantasy book witha femal protagonist - Alanna and the subsequent books in that series, by Tamora Pierce, for example - so one wonders why more female writers don't have a shot at it.

10:09 / 22.11.01

Do you guys think that a book supposed to be a fairy-tale would have problems being marketed to kids if it had a passage with a horny tavern owner trying to rape a girl... and references to a cult which performs infanticide? And to a king with the habit of forcing the maids into having sex with him? (It's all very en passant, not actually described)
I'm writing this little thing, and I'm kinda worried that it ends up all dark and serious, and refused by the publishing houses for being too violent and brooding...
There's not a market for "adult fantasy" here, whatever it means.

I don't want to waste my time to end up with 80.000 words that no one will want to risk their money in.
Not trying to plug or anything here, I just don't know anything about this fantasy thing - except for The Hobbit, which I have read. And not enjoyed. - Thoughts, anyone? Help would be appreciated.

ONLY NICE THINGS

10:20 / 22.11.01

I think that children are a lot more aware and able to deal with things than they are often given credit for - His Dark Materials has some pretty gorey stuff.

A also think that you might want to do some research - look at other books in the same genre, see what they put in and leave out, talk to publishers or check the publishing press to see if there is any demand...if your desire is to sell it. If your desire is to write it, that's a different matter.

The Creation (possibly with a cross-post to Help) might be a better place to get some inside track on this sort of thing.

10:24 / 22.11.01

Also bear in mind that most traditional fairy stories (well, European ones at any rate - I don't know about Brazilian ones) were about death, sex, skulduggery and so on before they got bowdlerised. The themes can be used without having to refer directly to the actions.

If you pitch it properly you might be able to get it into a 'young adults' list.

Mordant Carnival

18:30 / 22.11.01

quote:Originally posted by Deva:
It seems to me that adults' fantasy/SF is much more likely to be misogynistic and heterocentric... I see kids' fantasy/SF as far queerer - partly, I suspect, because adult m/f relationships are less likely to be a focus...

I like Asimov's stories loads- he was an amazing ideas man- but his characterizations are utterly shite. I think it's telling that my fave character in all his books is R. Daneel, the robot; Asimov's robots are more beliveable than his flesh-and-blood people. Now, if you can't do characterization it follows that your relationships are going to be cardboardesque, and almost certainly end up as little puppet theatres for whatever sex predjudices you may be harbouring. A lot of the sexual relationships in SF/fantasy fiction have an almost prosthetic feel, as if they're not an organic part of the narrative but have been attached artificially.

Also, I believe that the books you read as a kid will tend to have younger authors, who may be freer of old predjudices (not always, tho') because ideas and thinking move on over time.

20:27 / 22.11.01

For Asimov, read Clarke. There are some great SF writers who are lousy writer writers. When I was younger, 12 or 13, I didn't mind this, because I was more interested in the ideas (as everyone is)... and I could fill in characterisation myself. Some people characterise, others write ideas. It's only know that I wish they could have done both.

It also made supposedly adult books easy to read; they weren't discussing things you couldn't understand, but new things they'd invented. They appeal to the imagination, not the heart. Hence why I still like reading decent SF for a break from other literature. Crap SF sadly remains crap SF for me.

Bester's The Demolished Man is fantastic either way, as an aside. I loved it. Great games with words, great motivations.

09:13 / 23.11.01

quote:Originally posted by Kit-Cat Club:

But it is possible to write a rites-of-passage derring-do fantasy book witha femal protagonist - Alanna and the subsequent books in that series, by Tamora Pierce, for example - so one wonders why more female writers don't have a shot at it.

Cool, never heard anyone else mention this series, think I've still got the first two of these lying around somewhere. Very refreshing if a bit aimed at the younger kids.

As for the HDM seresi I thought the use of Christian themes was quite refreshing, take Paradise Lost and twist it like balloon animals :-).

It was a lot easier to stomach that 'The Last Battle', even was I was a lot younger this narnia book made me think he'd lost it big style. Pity really I still think they're a good set of kids books, for the time they were written. Stand up a lot better than the secret seven, now they were reactionry

Come on people hurry up and finish the Amber Spyglass so we can get going :-)

16:44 / 24.11.01

[spoilers for THE LAST BATTLE]

Mordant, when you said "lost it big style" did you mean C.S. Lewis had lost his mind or his talent or both?

that bit where Arslan curses the monkey did leave a bad taste in my mouth as did that strange part where the kids still living on Earth die in a convenient bus crash(!) and get to live in Narnia forever.

Mordant Carnival

20:15 / 24.11.01

quote:Originally posted by Ria:
[spoilers for THE LAST BATTLE]

Mordant, when you said "lost it big style" did you mean C.S. Lewis had lost his mind or his talent or both?

I think you'll find that was invisible_al, Ria.

22:02 / 24.11.01

Science fiction/ fantasy doesn't normally deal with sex too well. This isn't just heterosexual sex but all other permutations. There is a sense of feeling uncomfortable about mentioning it. It doesn't deal with ethnicity too well either. Two writers that deal very well with both are Octavia Butler and Samuel Delaney. Both are black writers and both touch on places that other writers just don't even dare. I can't imagine Arthur C Clarke writing Clay's Ark.

ONLY NICE THINGS

07:28 / 26.11.01

Ah, Delaney - the James Baldwin of sci-fi.

07:48 / 26.11.01

Anyone read Joan Aiken? I'm only familiar with her televised works like The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and Black Hearts in Battersea, but I've just got an advance review copy of her new book The Scream.

ONLY NICE THINGS

07:48 / 26.11.01

New book? She must be dead by now, surely?

I remember with fondness her short stories, which tend to adhere very much to that "Five Children and It" paradigm of odd things happening to middle-class english children with loving but slightly distant parents.

10:36 / 26.11.01

SPOILERS for the Last Battle

re: The Last Battle; it's quite complex (if not incoherent) on religion, if I recall correctly - remember the 'good Calormene' who thought he had been worshipping Tash when he had in fact been worshipping Aslan all along? But on the other hand, this makes Tash inherently evil. Also the chief sin of the ape (again, IIRC) is mixing religions - hence Tashlan (an ass wearing a lion's skin - oh, the symbolism).

The Silver Chair is my favourite...

Regrettable Juvenilia

11:14 / 26.11.01

quote:Originally posted by Kit-Cat Club:
The Silver Chair is my favourite...

Well, it is by far the kinkiest.

S
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If memory serves, having not gotten all of that women + sex = EVIL stuff out of his system in either The Magician's Nephew or The Lion, etc, CS Lewis in this one has a young prince captured by a beuatiful older woman who, when she's not keeping him tied to a chair or brainwashed in her underground lair, parades him around in a total-immersion suit of black armour. Then there's the bit where the kids come to rescue him, and the evil woman throws some powder on the fire to make druggy smoke, and starts playing a harp or lyre and hypnotising them all... "There never was a Narnia"... "No, there never was a Narnia"...

It's also one of the darkest - seem to recall the beginning is quite freaky, with a huge clifftop, and then things keep going wrong... Eustace is the hero at this point, isn't he? Him and some new girl. And doesn't it end with Aslan scaring the shit out of the school bullies?

I bet The Silver Chair was Philip Pullman's favourite Narnia book. It's all over The Amber Spyglass (which I am close to finishing now... on tenterhooks...).

11:44 / 26.11.01

Has anyone read Out of the Silent Planet or Perelandra? It would be interesting to see what Lewis's adult sci-fi is like, I think.

Flyboy: yes, her name is Jill, isn't it. I'd forgotten quite how queer all that stuff with Rillian is. That would explain why it is my favourite, of course. Oh yes, and the bit on the clifftop at the beginning

SPOILER

is the death of Caspian (Eustace was expecting him to be the age he was at the end of the Dawn Treader).

[ 26-11-2001: Message edited by: Kit-Cat Club ]

14:46 / 26.11.01

CS Lewis for grown-ups> That Hideous Strength and Perelandra - more polemic than allegory. Not read 'Silent Planet' with plenty of Boys Own Adventure thrown in. Actually a bit tedious.

17:15 / 26.11.01

quote:Originally posted by Centaurus:
It doesn't deal with ethnicity too well either. Two writers that deal very well with both are Octavia Butler and Samuel Delaney. Both are black writers and both touch on places that other writers just don't even dare. I can't imagine Arthur C Clarke writing Clay's Ark.

Robert Silverberg gets close to both at his best, but it's not nearly the prime concern it is with Butler. I've read Delaney, but only aaages ago, so I'm not as up on him as I should be.

17:31 / 26.11.01

quote:Originally posted by Kit-Cat Club:
Has anyone read Out of the Silent Planet or Perelandra? It would be interesting to see what Lewis's adult sci-fi is like, I think.

Out of the Silent Planet: pretty good fantasy disguised as science fiction, with a kind of spiritual cosmology hiding in the background not very subtly. Does introduce well the idea of ecology (at a time when it was still rather new to science) - the idea being that Earth is the "silent planet," the one sphere the other planetary intelligences can't hear due to, well, Our Fallen Nature. There are overtones of the kind of zen fascism Morrison refers to in Marvel Boy - all beings enjoying a planet-wide communion of souls.
Mars is populated by intelligent, benificent otters.

The main baddie is a human who invents a form of space travel -- venturing "out" of the silent planet, geddit?

In Perelandra, the same wicked scientist plays the serpent figure in a straight up "What If...?" type story about the Garden of Eden, taking place on the vast, rolling oceans of Venus. Much more of an allegory than the other two books.

That Hideous Strength I remember liking least; I think it had the least fiction and the most editorializing (or, as described above, polemicizing) of any of the books. Although, for some reason, I seem to recall an animal rights subtext to it. Not sure why - never bothered to reread it when I reread the other two.

[ 26-11-2001: Message edited by: grant ]

18:34 / 26.11.01

quote:Originally posted by grant:

That Hideous Strength ...I seem to recall an animal rights subtext to it.

Lewis opposed vivisection in his non-fiction as well as in The Hidden Strength.

I enjoyed Perelandra the best of his Space Trilogy. You might read it as a response to Paradise Lost, a criticism of the idea of evil as heroic or dynamic. Lewis and Morrison’s conceptions of evil are surprisingly similar: not freedom but slavery, not power but impotence, not free thought but ignorance, not original but derivative.

09:52 / 27.11.01

anyone see the television version of The Silver Chair? that had some of the most intense and literally scary acting (by the actor playing the cursed prince) I have seen in anything let alone a children's production. and Tom Baker wiggin' out. he played Puddleglum I liked it better than the book.

12:07 / 27.11.01

quote:Originally posted by Ria:
[spoilers for THE LAST BATTLE]

Mordant, when you said "lost it big style" did you mean C.S. Lewis had lost his mind or his talent or both?
that bit where Arslan curses the monkey did leave a bad taste in my mouth as did that strange part where the kids still living on Earth die in a convenient bus crash(!) and get to live in Narnia forever.

Well the phrase 'Lost the Plot' has several meanings but I mean he threw away what was good about the books and concentrated on the bad.

The good stuff like the fantasy elements and the general sense of wonder were just lacking in the Last Battle which really just ammounted to Lewis having a rant about things he doesn't like.

Teenagers today for a start, anyone whos begun to think about sex obviously isn't good enough for the kingdom of god. Oh and all of the relgion stuff really takes center stage instead of being allegry (which I could cheerfully ignore or mess with).

*sigh* I'll go and read some more Tamora Pierce then :-). Is her other stuff as good as the Alanna series?

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