A Seed Planted

“As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope. ”

— Ursula Le Guin

When I was younger, science fiction, fantasy and horror formed the bulk of my discretionary media consumption. I lived in a lower-middle class, racially segregated neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio. Still, I wanted for nothing. I was born in a loving nuclear family. I was within walking distance of my school and two library branches (imagine - two!) To supplement, I regularly took the Rapid Transit and two buses downtown to the massive Cleveland public library where, armed with as many books as I could carry, sat among the stacks and endless card catalogues immersed in other worlds - dreaming. At night I’d eagerly anticipate the next installment of Outer Limits, the irony embedded in Night Gallery, the scares and hi-jinks of the Robinson family expedition in Lost in Space, and finally, devoured Star Trek with its multicultural cast, cheesy paper maché planets and bad alien makeup jobs. Immersed in books and media I dreamed of what I could be and of life, not just outside of my neighborhood, but outside of the planet’s boundaries. It was liberating.

Science fiction was my refuge. It disguised real world conflicts in pages filled with fantastical things that didn’t exist yet outside of the mind of the author. I used my imagination to see the rich landscape of the cylindrical alien ship’s interior in Arthur C. Clarke’s “Rendevous with Rama.” It made sense and didn’t at the same time. As a teenager, I didn’t know enough science to understand the ramifications of creating a city in a zero gravity environment. And who had heard of Quantum Physics? Certainly not me! Decades later I watched Christopher and Jonathan Nolan’s movie “Interstellar” which depicted a similar environment (Cooper Station) and suddenly the images I’d stored from Clarke’s book came into view as well. Aha! - Circular rotations and gyros to simulate gravitational pull in the vacuum of space! And to that end, I had another practical application for my school formulas about radius, diameter and circumference.

“Fantasy is totally wide open; all you really have to do is follow the rules you’ve set. But if you’re writing about science, you have to first learn what you’re writing about. ”

— Octavia Butler

So why is this important - both then and now? It is through science fiction I discovered my love of math and science. In the endless realistic fiction books shoved at me by rigid school curriculum I saw only the human condition as it existed in the past or present. The characters were people I didn’t know or could never be. I didn’t particularly find Tudor Stuart England relevant as a path forward even as I processed that there were “Tudor-style” mansions in the rich neighborhood nearby. I suppose I could have used math to extrapolate Pa’s crop yields in Little House on the Prairie. And, to be honest, I was (and am still) full up on stories of black people who solved a plot construction only to still be stuck in the same dreary reality at the end.

As an alternative, science fiction provided a place for the well-adjusted and the misfits and outcasts to coexist (the latter often the ones executing technological advances in our future). In “A Wrinkle In Time,” a nerdy girl explored multiple dimensions and tesseracts. “Forbidden Planet” introduced Robby the Robot (albeit a man in a robot suit but I was willing to suspend my disbelief). Now scientists have created real robots with artificial intelligence. Space flight? Jules Verne was taking us to the moon long before the United States and Russia designed their first rocket boosters. And remember that Star Trek communicator? Most people now carry a version in their pocket. So who is to say there will not be a real time machine in the future? Einstein’s theories suggest time is not the constant we predict it to be but is relative to the observer.

“You often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons.”

— The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

The integration of middle grade science fiction as a mainstream choice for readers is particularly important. It fills in a landscape of books primarily occupied by adults. Middle grade is an age where students are devouring literature but rigid dictums of what it takes to get into college are steering them elsewhere. Slightly more sophisticated than books for younger children but accessible across multiple age groups, MG sci-fi is now finding a broad audience. In those pages readers can follow imperfect, often not quite “ready for prime time” characters like themselves who stretch beyond their boundaries while still dealing with normal every day feelings and reactions to fantastical events. Kids (and adults) who make mistakes and learn resilience through failure. Characters who bicker but still come together at the right moments to combine their collective experiences to fashion out a solution to the ongoing struggle at hand. Science fiction can deal with race, conflicts, or just petty turf wars and bullies but in a way that hints at something bigger and better than our individual selves at the end.

And honestly, I’m encountering a number of adults now confessing they read MG Sci-fi because it can be thought provoking and fun. The conversations start with “I don’t usually read Middle Grade but I loved. . . “

Incorporating math and science, our genre opens up possibilities by tapping into a reader’s internal motivation to make things happen that don’t yet exist. It strips away barriers to asking “What if?” and translates the text into a roadmap for getting there, even if “there” is hundreds of years away.

Middle grade science fiction is where dreams live and hope flourishes. It is a glimpse at our future. It is a seed planted.

And so we write.

“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next. ”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Christine Taylor-Butler is the author of more than 80 books for children, including her science fiction series: The Lost Tribes. A graduate of MIT, she has found her tribe among the geeks and nerds who see a future full of hopeful possibilities. She currently lives in Kansas City, MO with her husband, a tank of fish, and cats who consider her both servant and head of their pride. She is proud member of SteaMG, Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) and the Kansas City Science Fiction and Fantasy Society.

http://www.ChristineTaylorButler.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ChristineTaylorButler.ChildrensAuthor/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/christinetaylorbutler/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChristineTB

steaMG is Launching Our Twitter Account with an EPIC Giveaway

We’re officially launching our Twitter account with an EPIC giveaway of THIRTEEN sci-fi/stem-inspired books for middle grade readers! Just (1) FOLLOW our steaMG twitter handle @MGSciFi and (2) RETWEET the giveaway announcement tweet—for a chance to win ALL of these books:

• Kim Long’s LEXI MAGILL AND THE TELEPORTATION TOURNAMENT (pre-order; book out Oct. 2019)

• Lamar Giles’ THE LAST LAST-DAY-OF-SUMMER (pre-order; book out Apr. 2019)

• Melanie Crowder’s THE LIGHTHOUSE BETWEEN THE WORLDS

• Nicole Valentine’s A TIME TRAVELER’S THEORY OF RELATIVITY (pre-order; book out Oct. 2019)

• Sarah Baughman’s THE LIGHT IN THE LAKE (pre-order; book out Sept. 2019)

• Stacy McAnulty’s THE MISCALCULATIONS OF LIGHTNING GIRL

• Ailynn Collins’ REDWORLD: YEAR ONE

• Caroline Carlson’s THE DOOR AT THE END OF THE WORLD

• Christine Taylor-Butler’s THE LOST TRIBES: SAFE HARBOR

• Fran Wilde’s RIVERLAND (pre-order; book out Apr. 2019)

• Jarrett Lerner’s REVENGE OF THE ENGINERDS

• Jeanne Zulick Ferruolo’s RUBY IN THE SKY

• Joshua Levy’s SEVENTH GRADE VS. THE GALAXY

AT LEAST three of these books will come signed (THE MISCALCULATIONS OF LIGHTNING GIRL; REVENGE OF THE ENGINERDS; and SEVENTH GRADE VS. THE GALAXY), maybe more.

We told you it was an epic giveaway.

RULES:

• FOLLOW @MGSciFi and RETWEET the giveaway announcement tweet for your chance to win! That’s it!

• Ends Wednesday, March 27, 2019, at 11:59pm EST

• Shipping to US only

There’ll be more giveaways in the future! So stay tuned to @MGSciFi and steamg.org!

Science Fiction: A Natural Fit for the Middle-Grade Reader

This week we are taking an academic dive into middle grade sci-fi with a special guest post by friend and fellow VCFA grad, Diane Telgen. I asked her to condense her brilliant thesis into a blog post, a herculean request to say the least. Of course, she did it easily and without complaint.

Please welcome, Diane Telgen.

Diane Telgen is a freelance writer and an editor with Angelella Editorial. She holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts; parts of this essay were excerpted from her critical thesis. Her current works in progress include a middle-grade science-fiction novel involving first contact at a lunar-orbiting space station. You can find her online at dianetelgen.com or on Twitter @originalneglet.

I’ve always had a love for science fiction. My earliest memories include my dad telling me to pay attention to the television because the future was here: man was about to land on the moon. Dad was a tech geek before such a term even existed, and novels by sci-fi’s Big Three—Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein—littered his bedside table. Any time Star Trek came on, first-run or repeats, we tuned in. There’s no question I owe my father for my affinity for science fiction and all things space-related.

A visit to my school library in sixth grade opened my eyes even further to the possibilities of the genre. I read all kinds of books voraciously, but one day I chanced upon a novel by Andre Norton titled Moon of Three Rings. I browsed the flap copy and thought the story, about a young crewmember on a galactic trading ship, sounded interesting. Then I scanned the first few pages and paused on the title page, where handwriting marred the clean white page. Under the byline, the school’s librarian had penciled in a different name: Norton, Alice Mary.[1]

My young self, barely cognizant of the feminist movement just then transforming the wider world, stared. Wait a minute—you mean GIRLS can write about SPACESHIPS?!?!?! 

From that point on, I devoured whatever science fiction I could find. Library books, my dad’s books, books I wheedled my mom to buy whenever we visited the book store … I wanted as much as I could read. By the time I was in my teens, the paucity of YA literature at the time meant I’d moved on to adult sci-fi, and fantasy, too. I was a full-fledged genre nerd, loud and proud.

My sixth-grade self somehow recognized that someday I’d want to write my own novels, and after finishing college I began writing in my spare time. Eventually I realized that my natural narrative voice lay closer to middle-grade and young-adult than adult genre fiction, and both my writing and reading habits turned back to children’s books. Sadly, I wasn’t finding much sci-fi being written for younger readers—or if I did, it wasn’t labeled as such. Star Trek and Star Wars and comic-book movies featuring mutant, scientist, and alien superheroes may have dominated pop culture over the past two generations, but publishers kept calling popular series like The Hunger Games or Divergent “dystopia” instead of the broader genre term: science fiction. Yes, there was Nancy Farmer’s award-winning House of the Scorpion, but that novel about cloning seemed to be an outlier.

When I decided to go to Vermont College of Fine Arts to get my MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults, I wrote on essay on the brilliant ways Farmer made the scientific aspects of her world easily accessible to her young readers. My advisor that semester, David Macinnis Gill—the author of the YA sci-fi series beginning with Black Hole Sun—suggested that maybe I’d found a subject for my critical thesis. Yes! I thought. I read as many middle-grade sci-fi novels as I could, from Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time—a childhood favorite—to more recent works. While the bulk of my thesis analyzed the methods these works used to present science, I opened by examining whether science fiction was an appropriate genre for a younger audience. As you can probably guess, my conclusion was another Yes! 

I came to this verdict despite the comparative dearth of middle-grade SF novels and the conventional wisdom, as one critic observed, “that while even very small children can appreciate the marvelous, ... it is difficult to convey scientific marvels to anyone who lacks an adequate grounding in basic science.”[2] Another critic made the fair point that many children’s books are “science fiction only by courtesy. Aliens and robots are reduced to the level of icon and take the place of fairies, elves and monsters.”[3] But she also questioned whether it was even possible to write “full” sci-fi for kids, arguing that works for children often neglects the genre’s essential theme of change in favor of resolutions involving coming-of-age or family issues. In true sci-fi, “the resolution is not the end of the story, it is the beginning, for SF resolutions are about change and consequence.”[4]

This is too narrow a definition, however, especially when considering sci-fi’s origins and development. The term has undergone many revisions since 1926, when pioneering magazine editor Hugo Gernsback defined “scientifiction” in the first issue of Amazing Stories as “a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.”[5] The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction notes:

[while] there is really no good reason to expect that a workable definition of sf will ever be established, ... we may feel that, if sf ever loses its sense of the fluidity of the future and the excitement of our scientific attempts to understand our Universe—in short, as more conservative fans would put it with enthusiasm though conceptual vagueness, its Sense of Wonder—then it may no longer be worth fighting over.[6]

Portraying possible futures and using science to comprehend the universe seems clear enough, but how does one define the “sense of wonder”? The phrase is open to interpretation, but many critics connect it with the work of Clarke, one of the best-known sci-fi authors of the twentieth century. He argued that “although it has become something of a cliché, perhaps the most important attribute of good science fiction—and the one that uniquely distinguishes it from mainstream fiction—is its ability to evoke the sense of wonder.”[7] In works such as Rendezvous with Rama and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clarke’s characters—and by extension the reader—marvel wide-eyed at encounters with aliens or alien technology, bringing to their experiences the same “sense of wonder” that a child has when learning about the wider world.

Two other pioneers of SF’s first Golden Age also remarked upon the inherent appeal that the genre holds for young readers. Heinlein, whose early SF novels of the 1950s were marketed to juveniles, asserted that “in a broader sense, all science fiction prepares young people to live and survive in a world of ever-continuing change by teaching them early that the world does change.”[8] The prolific and influential writer Asimov, best known for his “Three Laws of Robotics,” agreed that “the great service of science fiction” was “to accustom the reader to the possibility of change, to have him think along various lines—perhaps very daring lines.”[9]

To anyone who thinks that science fiction isn’t appropriate for the middle-grade audience, or that you can’t write “real” sci-fi for them, I counter: the genre has an inherent appeal for young readers. They explore the world around them with the natural curiosity of a scientist and are more open to learning about the weird and wonderful universe around them. So go build your new and exciting sci-fi worlds. Encourage young minds to remain open, to find joy in exploring a universe full of possibility, and to consider strange new worlds without automatically rejecting them as different. These are worthy goals for a writer in any genre.

[1] Never mind that “Alice Mary” legally changed her name to “Andre” long before the book’s publication; librarians are thorough when it comes to their catalogues.

[2] Levy, Michael M. “Editor’s Introduction II: Boys and Science Fiction.” The Lion and the Unicorn 28.2 (2004): ix-xi.

[3] Mendlesohn, Farah. “Is There Any Such Thing as Children’s Science Fiction?: A Position Piece.” The Lion and the Unicorn 28.2 (2004): 294.

[4] Mendlesohn, p. 289.

[5] Quoted in Stableford, Brian M., John Clute, and Peter Nicholls. “Definitions of SF.” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Eds. John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls, and Graham Sleight. Gollancz, 2 Apr. 2015. Web.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Clarke, Arthur C. Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!: Collected Essays, 1934-1998. Ed. Ian T. Macauley. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999, p. 404.

[8] Heinlein, Robert A. “Science Fiction: Its Nature, Faults and Virtues.” Turning Points: Essays on the Art of Science Fiction. Ed. Damon Knight. New York: Harper & Row, 1977, p. 27.

[9] Asimov, Isaac. “Social Science Fiction.” Turning Points: Essays on the Art of Science Fiction. Ed. Damon Knight. New York: Harper & Row, 1977, p. 58.

New steaMG Author Book Out Today!

Happy Book Birthday to Joshua S. Levy!

School hasn't just gotten out: it's gone clear across the galaxy. And now it's up to Jack and his friends to get everyone home.

PSS 118 is just your typical school except that it's a rickety old spaceship orbiting Jupiter. When the school is mysteriously attacked, thirteen-year-old Jack receives a cryptic message from his father (the school's recently-fired-for-tinkering-with-the-ship science teacher). Amidst the chaos, Jack discovers that his dad has built humanity's first light-speed engine and given Jack control of it. To save the ship, Jack catapults it hundreds of light-years away and right into the clutches of the first aliens humans have ever seen. 

Congratulations Andre Norton Award Finalists!

The Middle Grade Sci-Fi Authors Alliance wishes a warm round of congratulations to the 2018 Andre Norton Award finalists!

The Andre Norton Award for Outstanding Young Adult Science Fiction or Fantasy will be presented by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America at their annual Nebula Weekend Conference on May 18, 2019.

The Andre Norton Award for Outstanding Young Adult Science Fiction or Fantasy Book finalists are:

• Children of Blood and Bone, Tomi Adeyemi (Henry Holt; Macmillan)

• Aru Shah and the End of Time, Roshani Chokshi (Rick Riordan Presents)

• A Light in the Dark, A.K. DuBoff (BDL)

• Tess of the Road, Rachel Hartman (Random House)

• Dread Nation, Justina Ireland (Balzer + Bray)

• Peasprout Chen: Future Legend of Skate and Sword, Henry Lien (Henry Holt)