the stereotypes they contain, and raise the question as to how far children adopt any
story which is twodimensional (and, by that token, the extent to which any story which
children adopt is necessarily simpler than any adult story). In these more ideology-
conscious times children are actively discouraged from adopting books such as these,
many of which are sexist, racist or otherwise politically incorrect.
Influential on these popular works were the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott and
Alexandre Dumas, and some have been taken over by and for children. Many children’s
writers tell us that they read Scott and Dumas when young. From Scott we might
identify Rob Roy, with its Highland dramatics, and Guy Mannering, with its young hero
Bertram and its happy resolution, as being typical. From Dumas derived the saga of the
three musketeers, with debonair swashbuckling and an easy identification with heroes
and of villains, and the engrossing but long-winded tale of delayed revenge in The Count
of Monte Cristo. The cladding is often gadzookery but the story motifs, the good/bad
iconography, and the satisfaction of simple vengeance provide the underlying appeal. It
is useful to compare these books with twentieth-century counterparts, like Alistair
MacLean, whose The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare have a similar appeal.
‘Buddy’ movies carry on the motifs to the present day. It is useful, too, to ask why some
of these works appeal more to boys than to girls, and whether roles and socialisation
affects their choices.
Science fiction and fantasy is a particularly fertile domain for locating works for adults
adopted by children. This may be because so many works incorporate themes and ideas
widely used in mainstream children’s books. Many authors write undifferentiatedly for
both readerships. Whereas adult writers include J.G. Ballard, Philip José Farmer,
Joanna Russ, Olaf Stapledon, Stanislas Lem and Yevgeny Zamyatin; and children’s
writers include Peter Dickinson, Nicholas Fisk, Tanith Lee, C.S.Lewis (pace the
Perelandra series), Ursula Le Guin and Madeleine L’Engle; Ben Bova, Alan Nourse and
Robert Heinlein seem to have set themselves in the middle, while Robert Sheckley and
Dean Koontz have been placed there by equal numbers of adult and young fans.
Any aficionado of the genre, certainly one over 12, might have read all these, and be
more preoccupied with discriminating between good and bad examples of each, or
between ‘sword and sorcery’ fantasy and technopunk ‘fact-fiction’, rather than between
books for adults and those for children. Cultural differences also exist between countries
in their views of how serious such works can be as commentaries on the human
condition. Where differences do lie between children’s and adult works, it is usually a
matter of complexity or explicitness.
Particular titles stand out as being adopted by children, by teachers and by children’s
publishers, like Farmer in the Sky, Citizen of the Galaxy, and Starship Troopers, all by
Robert Heinlein, and some of Harry Harrison’s novels like Spaceship Medic. The versatile
Robert Silverberg, with stories like The Face of the Waters and Kingdoms of the Wall,
explore futuristic catastrophes and journeys of personal pain and self-discovery that are
common narrative coinage for children and adults. Similarly poised are the Star Trek
television programmes and films, with the sixty-plus spin-off novels and the rapidly
growing series based on George Lucas’s Star Wars.
Animal stories offer other insights into the process of adoption. Isabelle Jan considers
the form, from Jack London’s White Fang to Kipling’s The Jungle Book, arguing that
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