sciences as science fact to back his fiction, as in Emma Tupper’s Diary (1971), Eva
(1988) and its companion piece A Bone from a Dry Sea (1992).
Nicholas Fisk specialises in shorter SF for the under-13s: catchy titles like Antigrav
(1978) and Wheelie in the Stars (1976) indicate his approach. His work can be
deceptively light-hearted when dealing with matters of life and death, for example in
Trillions (1971) in which a fanatical general decides to use nuclear weapons to destroy
an alien mineral. Grinny (1973) and its sequel You Remember Me! (1984) deal with alien
invasion, while A Hole in the Head (1991) produces a cure for the hole in the ozone
layer.
Louise Lawrence is Britain’s leading woman SF writer for teenagers, and she confronts
her protagonists with inescapable moral choices, beginning with Andra (1971) and The
Power of Stars (1972). Her next SF novels were published only in the USA, until she
returned to Britain with Children of the Dust (1985) a powerful anti-nuclear novel
inspired by her children’s involvement with the peace movement. Throughout the 1980s
she produced a fine sequence of novels: The Disinherited (1994) is an escape/forbidden
romance set in a future gripped by the ultimate energy crisis and the greenhouse effect.
British-born Monica Hughes, now a Canadian citizen and probably the leading woman
SF writer for children today, has taken advantage of new freedoms to make girls her
leading characters, and does not share the British prejudice against space adventures.
Her Isis trilogy (from The Keeper of the Isis Light (1980)) is a study in prejudice and
superstition with leading roles for girls, and many of her books, such as The Golden
Aquarians (1994), are concerned with the need for peace and reconciliation.
From the mid-1970s the mood in the USA has been individualistic, breaking away
from the formulae of Heinlein and Norton. Outstanding examples have been Jay
Williams’s Danny Dunn series; Laurence Yep’s Sweetwater (1973), set on a colonised
planet; Robert C.O’Brien’s Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (1971) about laboratory rats
with increased intelligence, and his proto-feminist, post-holocaust Z for Zachariah
(1975); and Virginia Hamilton’s trilogy about four children with psychic gifts, beginning
with Justice and Her Brothers (1978). Sylvie Engdahl explored deep religious and
philosophical questions with books such as Enchantress from the Stars (1970), while
H.M.Hoover backs up her suspenseful plots with anthropological research.
Canadian-born Douglas Hill made an important contribution to British children’s SF
with new sagas derived from memories of Heinlein and Flash Gordon (such as the Last
Legionary quartet (1979–81)) at a time when the genre seemed to be becoming
somewhat rarefied. From the late 1970s, non-SF-genre children’s authors were turning
to the genre, such as Ann Schlee (The Vandal (1979)), Penelope Lively (The Voyage of
QV66 (1978)), Jan Mark (The Ennead (1978)) Rosemary Harris (A Quest for Orion (1978)),
John Rowe Townsend (The Xanadu Manuscript (1977)), Robert Westall (Futuretrack 5
(1983) and Urn Burial (1987)).
SF has come to address many contemporary issues. The anti-nuclear protests of the
early 1980s found a voice in Robert Swindells’s Brother in the Land (1984), Gudrun
Pausewang’s The Last Children [Die Letzen Kinder von Schewenborn] (1983, English
trans. 1989), and Dr Seuss’s The Butter Battle Book (1984). Religion has been discussed
through Madeleine L’Engle’s complex series of five books beginning with A Wrinkle in
Time (1962), Fay Lapka’s Dark is a Colour (Canada 1990), while specialist religious
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