Fantastic Reviews Interviews Paolo Bacigalupi
Here’s a new interview with Paolo Bacigalupi, and like every interview I’ve seen with him this one is profoundly thoughtful and interesting. Here’s a section that really struck a chord with me, because it’s something I spend a lot of time thinking about too:
Fantastic Reviews (FR): We had a whole category like that, the Heinlein and the Norton, science fiction written for teenagers, which they just don’t publish any more.
Paolo Bacigalupi (PB): Not just for teenagers, but for boys. [My wife, a teacher] has a lot of Newbery Award-winning books – The House on Mango Street is an amazing, wonderful book; it just doesn’t work for boys, though. Boys want adventure, they want to go out and do shit, you know?
It strikes me that there’s sort of a trend right now to say that good children’s literature is not adventure literature. Almost by default that means that good children’s literature is not literature that’s well-geared for boys. So at that point, boys who are already predisposed to fuck themselves up when they’re at school then have one less reason to engage with learning. It’s horrifying enough to watch the way my wife has had to deal with boys in her classes. These are bright boys, but they’ve got very little to grab onto. They can only read Ender’s Game once, and that’s it. What else are they going to do after that? You can throw them a Starman Jones, you can throw them a Citizen of the Galaxy, but those are dated and they’re getting more dated.
That’s something I think about. What would it be like to write boys’ stories, really honest boys’ stories that are designed to help boys actually get engaged with reading again, instead of thinking that’s a girl activity, which is where it feels like things are going. I find that deeply troubling, so that’s something I’ve been thinking about, what would a YA boys’ story or a juvenile boys’ story look like these days?
It’s interesting, because if you think of something like Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, at the very end, the main character who has grown up and become a young man by the end of it, his triumphant moment is beating up the bully who was troubling him back on Earth. He gets back to the soda fountain and he beats up the bully, and that’s the cathartic success at the very end. I don’t think those endings are even allowed; I don’t think you can do that now. And that strikes me as an expression that certain qualities of boy-ness are no longer allowed. That alpha-male ape behavior is not OK any more. We’re going to put you guys, you little boys, in a certain role that says: don’t do anything dangerous, don’t do anything crazy, by all means don’t get in any fights, and don’t think that there is any alpha-male stuff going on, even though it is because that’s how your brain has been hard-wired for the last million years. Suppress your nature instead of channeling your nature.
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