Thing’s That Don’t Go Away – Harry Potter and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Sarah Zettel

The sixth Harry Potter movie came out on Wednesday. The buzz, the tweets and the box office have all been good. Despite some speculation that the release date was moved from fall to summer to avoid any collision with certain sparkly vampires, it looks much more likely that the switch was made because Harry can be counted on as a blockbuster, even when the book series finished up two years ago.

     In terms of draw and influence, the movies remain in second place compared to the books. Except for maybe the first one, the HP movies have all been good quality fantasy thrillers created by people who understand the genre and how to make it work on film.

     The books, however, probably saved an entire literary genre, and they did it the old-fashioned way; by selling like hot-cakes.

     If you walk into the young adult section of any national chain bookstore the first thing you’ll notice is the sheer size of it. It’s as big as any of the adult genre sections, romance included.

     The second thing you’ll notice is that a lot of those books have something to do with vampires. This is the Twilight Effect and that’s a separate column.

     But in with the vampire romances, you’ll also find dozens upon dozens of science fiction and fantasy books geared at high school and down. They’re stand-alones and they’re parts of series. KATHY’S BOOK, THE HUNGER GAMES, GONE, UNWOUND, LIBYRINTH, SKINNED, UGLIES, MAXIMUM RIDE and on and on. They’re set in space and on Earth, near future and far future. They cover everything from the biological science to space travel to quantum science.

     Before the first movie opened, the Harry Potter books were shattering sales records across the board. Kids lining up around the block to get their hands on a book. A book! That archaic, forgotten object that had become nothing so much as they symbol of the overall decay of American society. All the experts knew kids didn’t read, kids couldn’t read, kids wouldn’t read and they’d known this for years. I read all about it in the newspaper growing up (of course, I was a weird kid, but that probably doesn’t surprise anybody).

     By the time the movies started coming out, midnight Harry Potter releases were a regular event in bookstores. Kids were all about the films, but they were still dragging their parents to the store to buy the books, and staying up all night to finish them like they’d never heard they were supposed to be dragging us all down the drain toward total illiteracy.

     Somehow, these kids were not acting in accordance with what was common knowledge. It was Common Knowledge that American kids were dumb. It was Common Knowledge they could not deal with longer books, or books that expected something of the reader in terms of vocabulary and emotional understanding.

     They weren’t, in short, supposed to be able to read or at all interested in good books.

     Now, I’m not trying to say that there were no good YA SF or Fantasy books on the shelves before HP. After all we had Tamora Pierce, Anne McCaffery, Francesca Lia Block, Andre Norton and Madeleine L’Engle decades before J.K. Rowling’s first volume hit the shelves. And I’m certainly not trying to say that the Harry Potter books are great literature. J.K. Rowling has a number of flaws as an author, some of them are her own and some of them come from the sheer pressure she was under while writing the last three books. But the series does tackle some tough themes of class, race and family, of where loyalty does and should lie, and of personal responsibility. She took some major risks in those last three books. She made lovable, heroic, Harry into a surly teen suffering from years of under threat of death. She spent a lot of time exploring the background of her villain, and showing the banal origins of evil. By the end of the series we know at least as much about Voldemort’s family as we do about Harry’s.

     Faced with this reality, the New York Publishers looked at the Common Knowledge about the reading habits of American kids, and they looked again at the sales figures. Then, they tossed Common Knowledge out and went with the sales figures. And from their they started using the Harry Potter books as the model for what was now okay in YA fiction.

     The Potter books were big, and they sold, so other kids books could be big. The Potter books had difficult themes and they sold (yes, other books have tackled difficult themes before, but publishing has a short memory), so other kids books could have difficult themes too. Harry Potter had magic, so shovel other kids books with magic to the front of the line. And because science fiction and fantasy have always been lumped together, YA science fiction got dragged along for the ride into the brave new post-Potter world.

     But that’s not the biggest change. The biggest change is the nature of the child protagonists, or rather, the gender.

     Because the final thing that was noticed by the publishing world was that while Harry Potter had a cross-gender appeal, the majority of the people buying the books were girls. So, the majority of the fantasy and science fiction that came onto the YA shelves post-Potter got aimed at girls.

     This is brand new.

     For the first time in the history of US publishing, most of the science fiction books on the shelves feature girls or women as active protagonists. YA SF is about girls growing up, discovering their own concerns, defeating their enemies and personal demons, girls falling in love (or not) and girls saving the world or the day. There are still plenty of books with boys or young men as protagonists (the ARTEMIS FOWL books leap to mind, as does, of course A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS) but this is the first time girls have achieved not just parity but a solid majority.

     And the books are selling. Not all are best sellers, to be sure, but they’re out there on Amazon, in the stores and in the libraries and more are coming. After years of complaining that kids aren’t reading SF anymore, the amount these new authors and new books are taking in is jaw-dropping. Yes, it’s also being pushed by the manga-revolution and by the fact that a huge amount of SF has diffused into the mainstream. But it was Harry and J.K. Rowling who broke down the door that these other phenomena had shoved open.

     Is this important? Yes. I’m not one of those people who believes that science fiction is necessary for the continuance of science and indeed, Western civilization itself (and yes, I have heard that view espoused). But I do believe that science fiction and fantasy in addition to being just plain fun contribute to a healthy mental diet. Science fiction gives a framework to examine big ideas, pleasant and unpleasant. It gives kids and adults a chance to try on the future, to play around with the kind of adventure that technology and the sweep of history creates. In fantasy, you can look back as well as forward. You can look at morality and mortality in ways that stories about high school popularity cannot match. The new books out there are doing all of this, and more and they are doing it as well or better as anything to come along in decades.

It has been famously said that the golden age of science fiction is thirteen. I’ve got to disagree, because I’m forty-two, and for my lifetime anyway, the golden age of SF is now.

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