25
Science Fiction
Jessica Yates
Not every genre of children’s literature has a corresponding adult genre—school stories
being one example—and it is only recently that the horror novel and murder mystery
have returned to children’s literature. Historical novels for adults and children both
have an honourable and independent pedigree; but while children’s fantasy enjoys a far
longer and more distinguished tradition than adult fantasy, which only became a
commercial genre after Tolkien’s success in the 1960s, children’s science fiction (SF) is
considered the poor relation both of adult science fiction and children’s fantasy. In this
chapter I shall discuss why this is so, and demonstrate how, since the 1950s, writers
specialising in children’s and teenage science fiction have raised the literary standard of
the genre.
The story of the development of children’s fantasy is well known (Green 1969/ 1980:1–
16), and authors choosing a supernatural mode for their children’s books would choose
fantasy or mild forms of the ghost story, not science fiction. Although the term ‘science
fiction’ was not coined until the late 1920s as an improved version of Hugo Gernsback’s
first name for the genre—‘scientifiction’ (Clute and Nicholls 1993:311, 1076), the genre
had been recognisably in existence for several decades as ‘scientific romance’, a term
applied to the work of Verne and Wells, and science fiction plots were also familiar in the
‘pulp’ literature read by adults and teenagers. So just as it can be argued that the first
modern science fiction novel is Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel Frankenstein (1818)—not
only because of its now-typical SF motif of the artificial man, but because of its theme of
the man who desires to rival nature through science—so one might look for
protojuvenile SF among the fantasy classics of the nineteenth century.
Science-fictional motifs may appear, therefore, in work whose overriding ethos is
magical. Although the story of The Cuckoo Clock (1877) includes a voyage to the moon, it
remains a children’s fantasy; in Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) the agency which
brings characters out of the past is magical. In general we find that children’s fiction
employing time travel to and from the past will be fantasy, and to the future, science
fiction. Although I would not claim Carroll’s Alice books as SF, we can still note the
somewhat scientific basis for their events: mathematics, the logical aspects of language,
and the challenge to the laws of physics in the looking-glass world.
My candidate for the first modern children’s SF novel—the counterpart to
Frankenstein for adults—is The Water-Babies (1863) by Charles Kingsley. The branch of
science known as Natural History forms the background, and one of the messages of
this deceptively entertaining, but highly didactic work, is that technology is right, if