I just couldn't get into A Song of Ice and Fire

Bloody hell, if I could write an adult book as complex and thought-provoking as Alan Garner's The Owl Service or Red Shift...

(And/or as good as a Paul Kelly song, but that's for another thread.)

With all this talk of high and low fantasy and YA it's worth noting that both LOTR and Harry Potter were written for a teenage (and in the case of HP pre-teen for the early books) audience. Technically speaking, LOTR was the YA of its time. And there's plenty of contemporary YA fiction out there that could be called high fantasy too, such as Henry H. Neff's Impyrium. The boundaries are very fuzzy and in general I don't find it a useful distinction to make.

The lament that "kids these days are/aren't ____ enough" is anecdotal at best, and usually a rose-tinted view of how much better one's own generation was at that age. When I was a kid, I saw stories about how baby boomers were the worst generation ever. Then GenXers were the worst. Right now Millennials are the worst, and there's a generation right behind them that's about to be the new worst.

yumpty-tum said:

With all this talk of high and low fantasy and YA it's worth noting that both LOTR and Harry Potter were written for a teenage (and in the case of HP pre-teen for the early books) audience. Technically speaking, LOTR was the YA of its time. And there's plenty of contemporary YA fiction out there that could be called high fantasy too, such as Henry H. Neff's Impyrium. The boundaries are very fuzzy and in general I don't find it a useful distinction to make.

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And Tolkien wrote The Hobbit for his kids.

jjdebenedictis said:

It's not exactly equivalent, but Clarkesworld magazine (science fiction mainly) has done some proper statistics on their submissions and acceptances, and you can find a lot of the results at their blog on clarkesworldmagazine.com.

The post I found most interesting is they found the majority of the stories submitted to them were from men, but the stories they actually published were split pretty close to 50-50 between women and men. (Link)

For whatever reason, men were more likely to submit stories that weren't quite ready yet, but stories of publishable quality came from women and men equally.

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I remember that report, though it's short fiction for one particular magazine, and it doesn't likely extrapolate to novel-length markets within the genre. It would be hard to get data for the ratio of novel submissions and acceptances by gender for different subgenres of SFF. I haven't even been able to get data on actual readership breakdowns of different categories within SFF, though many people confidently assert that more men read epic fantasy, while more women read urban fantasy. I've certainly run across plenty of female epic fantasy fans and plenty of male UF fans online, but it's hard to know how representative they are.

It's not even easy to define what UF or epic fantasy is. Some books fall clearly within one of these two categories, but some blend elements, or are neither, and some (like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel are categorized as UF, even though they don't really fit the criteria (imo, at least).

Even YA, which is a more clearly defined marketing category, has some rather fuzzy boundaries.

zanzjan said:

I hear this all the time re: reading Science Fiction & Fantasy. When will I "grow up" to (read/write) adult books? And that's just as much BS. It implies the same thing you're implying: that SFF, or YA, aren't fully-realized narrative forms, only a stepping stone to real, "mature" literature.

Also, IME, kids who enjoy reading will keep reading and keep expanding their intake to what's available around them that suits their evolving tastes. Maybe they won't leave YA, but then, googling suggests some 70% of YA readers are adults who found it as adults, so clearly there is enough there to appeal to a wide array of tastes, needs, & degrees of sophistication.

And that really is the end of this derail.

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You're talking to someone who loves Harry Potter, LOTR and C.S. Lewis. Again, you're making assumptions as to what I mean. Recreational reading has nothing to do with children who aren't reaching their potential when it comes to reading. I saw it quite a bit when I got to college. More and more young people who simply weren't ready for it when it came to several subjects. I'm not perfect, but when an author like David McCullough does a lecture at a major university and e finds college students who didn't even know that all the colonies were on the East coast, you might have to admit that there might be a problem with education and advancement in education. People and college should know at least that. So many people don't know know things that they probably should know if they're going to try for a bachelors. I was astounded several times by the things people didn't know when I was working on my history and sociology degrees. They can read whatever they want recreationally, but they need to invest in self education and reading comprehension advancement.

gambit924 said:

You're talking to someone who loves Harry Potter, LOTR and C.S. Lewis. Again, you're making assumptions as to what I mean. Recreational reading has nothing to do with children who aren't reaching their potential when it comes to reading. I saw it quite a bit when I got to college. More and more young people who simply weren't ready for it when it came to several subjects. I'm not perfect, but when an author like David McCullough does a lecture at a major university and e finds college students who didn't even know that all the colonies were on the East coast, you might have to admit that there might be a problem with education and advancement in education. People and college should know at least that. So many people don't know know things that they probably should know if they're going to try for a bachelors. I was astounded several times by the things people didn't know when I was working on my history and sociology degrees. They can read whatever they want recreationally, but they need to invest in self education and reading comprehension advancement.

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How are problems in the US higher education system the fault of YA books or YA categories?

If the problem is that American readers are infantilising themselves, it won't be because there are YA categories. You draw too long a bow, I think - although if you have respected studies rather than anecdotes, I'd be willing to read them.

mccardey said:

How are problems in education the fault of YA books?

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I never said they were. I'm saying that kids aren't being encouraged to further self education. Some do, but the majority don't. Probably because they have their own problems and don't see the point, but still. It has nothing to do with YA. It has everything to do with young people not being ready for the world of higher education, or just the world in general sometimes.

Gambit, if people continually misunderstand what you meant, perhaps you should take a harder look at your phrasing instead of blaming others for not puzzling out what you actually meant.

gambit924 said:

I never said they were. I'm saying that kids aren't being encouraged to further self education. Some do, but the majority don't. Probably because they have their own problems and don't see the point, but still. It has nothing to do with YA. It has everything to do with young people not being ready for the world of higher education, or just the world in general sometimes.

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Your anecdotal evidence is flimsy at best. Cites, please, or stop stating your opinions as facts.

I still don't see the connection between a fondness for reading YA or kids' stories and a lack of interest in self-education. I'm a middle-aged woman who spends way too much time playing computer games and who just re-read the Harry Potter books. I also just read a memoir about an obscure historical event, have Science issues sitting on my night stand, and spend a lot of time on and off the web reading about history, sociological issues, and science.

I can't even say I generally read the "edifying" stuff expressly to be better informed (aside from specific articles I notice that might be useful for teaching college bio courses). I just find it interesting. And sometimes something I run across in a work of fiction, even SF and F, will lead me to research something historical, sociological, or scientific.

This is anecdotal, though, and it's impossible to extrapolate this to the population as a whole. I rather suspect that the people who are most poorly informed and who struggle to keep up with reading assignments in college aren't people who have read lots of "pulpy" or YA fiction for fun, but instead are members of the rather alarming percentage of people who never read for pleasure at all. One thing that is interesting is that younger adults are actually more likely to read for pleasure than older adults. This runs counter to the "kids these days are too busy playing video games and fiddling with social media to read books" argument.

[edit] and boy, I just checked the original post, and this thread really has strayed a bit off course, hasn't it? The point, still, is that not liking a particular piece of fiction is fine, but that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with other people liking it.

At what point did I say, "YA is bad, people shouldn't read it?" I didn't, did I? I merely noted that young people need to engage in some self education that goes beyond what they learn from their high school or middle school studies. We should never just accept ignorance as being okay. It's true that some people are and there's nothing we can do about that. However once it becomes okay, that's where society goes down hill. Anyway, I think I'm going to bow out of this. See you all later.

What?

that is some serious deflection (twice in one thread, too).

gambit924 said:

I merely noted that young people need to engage in some self education that goes beyond what they learn from their high school or middle school studies. We should never just accept ignorance as being okay. It's true that some people are and there's nothing we can do about that. However once it becomes okay, that's where society goes down hill. Anyway, I think I'm going to bow out of this. See you all later.

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Well if that was your entire point, this was a funny old thread to be making it in. And I still don't see where YA comes into it.

gambit924 said:

At what point did I say, "YA is bad, people shouldn't read it?" I didn't, did I? I merely noted that young people need to engage in some self education that goes beyond what they learn from their high school or middle school studies. We should never just accept ignorance as being okay. It's true that some people are and there's nothing we can do about that. However once it becomes okay, that's where society goes down hill. Anyway, I think I'm going to bow out of this. See you all later.

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Wow. That's a hell of a retcon.

No one has said that you've said "YA is bad." You have, however, inferred on several occasions that it is somehow inferior to "adult" fiction, that it should be merely a stepping-stone on the way to "proper books", which is frankly BS. To whit (bolding mine):

gambit924 said:

But I think they were trying to get at the point that kids aren't being encouraged to advance past that. This in itself isn't healthy. And it really has nothing to do with the classification, or genre, or whatever. It's just scary that young people sometimes aren't getting the push they need to move forward.

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gambit924 said:

Recreational reading has nothing to do with children who aren't reaching their potential when it comes to reading.

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For the record, I find it amazing that you seem to feel qualified to pass judgement on the quality and complexity of the current YA market when you also said:

gambit924 said:

I don't really read YA either.

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So, let's just assume you don't actually know WTF you're talking about on this one.



eta: And just so this isn't a complete derail, I enjoyed ASOIAF, but I read them before I took up writing, so I might feel differently if I read them now. I also could've chopped about 300 pages from each book, simply by getting rid of all the bloody descriptions of food.

JJ Litke said:

The lament that "kids these days are/aren't ____ enough" is anecdotal at best, and usually a rose-tinted view of how much better one's own generation was at that age. When I was a kid, I saw stories about how baby boomers were the worst generation ever. Then GenXers were the worst. Right now Millennials are the worst, and there's a generation right behind them that's about to be the new worst.



And Tolkien wrote The Hobbit for his kids.

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Exactly the point I was trying to make. I'm sure there were people running around in 1952 shouting about how elves and dwarves and magic swords were being dumbed down for 'the kids today' who wouldn't know a real epic if it hit them in the face. So whilst stylistically LOTR and HP may be very different that doesn't make one more or less high-brow than the other.