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Rating: 
Summary: Eminently readable, excellent library reference resource.
Review: Presenting Young Adult Science Fiction Suzanne Elizabeth ReidMacmillan Library Reference ISBN: 080571653X, 1998. vii + 230. Presenting Young Adult Science Fiction is clearly intended for a younger critical audience, the young adult reader of SF. The book is eminently readable, especially for a less experienced audience of the genre, as is intended for the Twayne's Young Adult Authors Series. This series "enables young readers to research the world of their favorite authors," and "provides teachers and librarians with insights and background material for promoting and teaching young adult novels." (ix). Reid succeeds with introducing the history of SF and of YA SF in that context. She contextualizes YA SF within the history of SF publishing in the West and in English. Her introductory essay is very useful to those unfamiliar with the field, hitting all the high points and missing little that the uninitiated need to know. It serves a reader best in pointing to by now familiar stages or periods for the development of the genre in general and in pointing to more detailed critical works for the details of these stages. She also makes largely defendable choices for seven major writers of YA science fiction, especially in the context of providing single-author studies of young readers. Yet a defense of her choice to focus on Orson Scott Card, Douglas Hill, H.M. Hoover, Pamela Sargent, Octavia Butler, Pamela Service and Piers Anthony, and Douglas Adams, would have to address the fact that at least five of these writers, Card, Sargent, Butler, Anthony and Adams were known for their adult SF much more than for their YA SF. Only two of the focal authors, Hoover and Hill, wrote almost exclusively for younger readers. It seems more clear that the choices of author were made to allow her to pursue thematic issues, as in the Sands and Frank work, while sticking to the series format of focusing on a single author. These themes are: historical perspectives, classical authors, science fiction adventure, alien worlds, feminism, gender and racism, science fantasy, humor, Cyberpunk and SF film. The one glaring exception to the single-author focus, entitled "Feminism and Science Fiction: Pamela Sargent," attends to a basic description of Sargent's fictional contributions but also includes a mini-history of women in science fiction that would have made at least as much, if not more, sense in the introduction. Perhaps this was done because of Sargent's significance as an editor of early anthologies of women SF writers, but it still seems out of place as Sargent is not known as a YA author. The bibliography thankfully is the same for Sargent in this as in all the other essays. Again like Sands and Frank, discussed below, Reid offers introductory essays that are easily readable but the lacunae, those authors who are barely mentioned, are obvious to a seasoned reader. The reader asks why she leaves out or gives short-shrift to such major, popular YA SF writers as Engdahl, Hamilton, L'Engle, Lawrence, Lowry and McCaffrey, to name a few. Yet the very choice of these authors emphasizes the impossibility of identifying a work as either YA or Adult SF. She does not stick to marketing categories, to an idealized list of authors who are known exclusively in YA circles. She mentions standard bibliographies and reference works as her background, but obviously has made a much more restrictive selection. Jan Bogstad, Reviewer END
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