YA Space Opera

[Sean Wills]

So, looking through previous threads, it seems that there are a few people here interested in doing YA Space Opera. I've just started the same thing after mulling it over for quite some time, and I'm looking for recommendations or general thoughts on the subject. Is there any recent* YA space opera I should be reading? Or any hypothetical reasons why it seems to be severely underrepresented on store shelves at the moment?

*(By 'recent' I mean stuff published since 'YA' as a category really took off, not older general SF featuring teenage protagonists.)

[shaldna]

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

[Roly]

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.

[Sean Wills]

Originally Posted by Roly

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.

See, that's what got me interested in the idea in the first place. To me, the solar system (my WIP is set in the local planets rather than a galaxy-spanning human empire) carries a greater sense of awe than any supernatural story element I can think of, and it's all real.

But if you look at an awful lot of space opera stuff, it tends to place more emphasis on the idea and the grand milieu than on characters. I recently read Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds, and it's a good case in point. The writing is fantastic and the world is as imaginative as any I've come across, but the characters didn't do it for me. One of the love-interest subplots in particular felt incredibly forced, since the two characters involved go from being working acquaintances to (apparently) in love with each other with almost no warning. I can't imagine something like that going over well with a YA audience, but it seems to be more common in 'adult' SF.

[Wavy_Blue]

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.

[PhoebeNorth]

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]

I used to love the Animorphs books (those and Goosebumps really got me 'into' reading in a big way), and I also read some of the licensed Star Wars stuff a long time ago.

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.

Originally Posted by Wavy_Blue

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 looked up Academy 7 and it's, uh...not the kind of thing I usually go for. Thanks for mentioning it though, it's always good to know what else is out there.

[PhoebeNorth]

Originally Posted by Sean Wills

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.

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.

[PhoebeNorth]

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.

[Sean Wills]

I've read one of McCaffrey's short stories ('The Ship Who Sang'), but am rather ashamed to say that I haven't read any of her novels. Definitely one to add to the (ever-expanding) reading list, though!

I'll also check out the -seed books, since the idea of a Generation ship has always fascinated me.