YA Space Opera

That would be an awesome idea. I love space opera, and I would be interested in seeing how this could be done as a ya

We were actually talking about it on last week's ya mega-chat on twitter. I asked YA authors what they'd love to see on the shelves and Holly Black's pick was Space Opera. My mind exploded because I totally didn't even think of that and how awesome a well done YA Space Opera could potentially be (think Star wars, star trek) but I'm totally, TOTALLY not the writer to do it. Me and aliens just don't mesh. I would read one in a heartbeat though.

To tell you the truth, that might be why it's so underrepresented in YA. Right now, it's about the real world + supernatural elements, elements that are fantastical, but still feel somehow human, or on a human plane. That's why I can't really think of any YA Space Opera right now...but that doesn't mean it can't be popular. Really, anything can be popular as long as it's well written and hits all the buttons that usually get the YA audience revved up.

One of my WIPs on the backburner is a YA space opera. It's not one I'm currently working on (waiting until I have more research time on my hands), but I think that there's a good potential for space opera in YA. IMO, the best thing about those well known space operas (Star Wars, Star Trek, BSG) are the characters, and character is usually the main focus of YA novels, so I think the two would work well together.

I'm certainly not a expert, though. As for YA space operas, Academy 7 by Anne Osterlund could be classified as such. I wouldn't recommend it, though. It was a pretty awful book.

I have the first two entries in a YA space opera trilogy currently trunked. I want to return to them--they were so much fun to write--but they were my first manuscripts and need a ton of editing just for things like formatting dialog, which I didn't have a handle on yet.

It was really, really hard to find YA sci-fi that was space opera, or even xenological (my big focus in the MSes was on alien/human interaction) when I was researching. I found two I liked, though: Singing the Dogstar Blues by Alison Goodman, and Farseed, by Pamela Sargent, which is a recent sequel to a fantastic book called Earthseed that came out about twenty years ago. And, even though they're ancient, I'd really, really recommend John Christopher's Tripod series for YA scifi with aliens. They're wicked awesome. And, since I'm already making suggestions that skew older, the Animorphs series (though that one is closer to MG than YA) delves into space opera in the later books with surprisingly thorough universe building for a series that was mostly viewed--probably erroneously--as a little fluffy.

And, though it might seem like a weird suggestion, I'd also recommend looking at licensed YA. There are a ton of Star Trek and Star Wars novels that work really well at addressing a young person's sense of adventure, whether they're aiming at an adolescent audience or not.

Sean Wills said:

The kind of tone I'm going for is very different to something like Animorphs, though. I'm interested in a more slow-burning, character driven novel than something about aliens. 'Contemporary YA-style story...IN SPACE' is kind of how I'm thinking about it, so I'm avoiding long descriptions of (among other things) how exactly the spaceships and some other pieces of technology work in order to focus on the characters. I have no idea if that will work or if it will end up falling apart, but so far it's a fun experiment.

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Definitely check out Earthseed and Farseed, then! They hinge on some harder sci-fi concepts than you might be aiming for (the first takes place on a generation ship; the second on a newly-colonized planet), but they're both fairly dark and character driven.

My goals were fairly similar--I'm not a hard SF fan by any means, so my "descriptions" of technology tended towards the hand-wavy--and I'm interested in aliens are characters more than illustrations of concepts, as they're sometimes used. But I think it's a really delicate balance in sci-fi written for any age. If the technology is poorly developed or awkwardly explained, it stands out--and then you risk losing established genre fans, who already exist as an available, passionate audience. I think that many teens who are into SF, particularly, hop right over to the adult section because there's just not a ton out there for them within YA; I think it would be great to create more novels for them (and the dystopic trend is a trend in the right direction!), but then, of course, you have to satisfy their cravings for cool spaceships and creatures and planets, too.

Oh, and if the event you've never read her stuff, Anne McCaffrey might be someone to look at, too. She's terribly dated in some ways now, and she wasn't writing specifically for teens, but her books are really, really appealing to teen audiences, and she has a couple series (the Talent series and the Brainship books) that are Star Wars-esque space opera. I suspect that if she'd started writing now, rather than in the sixties, she'd be totally writing YA.