Rosemary's comments (member since Apr 25, 2008)

Rosemary's comments from the Building a SciFi/Fantasy Library group.

My books get called "Young Adult" by Amazon.com and, in movie rating terms, are probably PG to PG-13 in their action. My first definitely had adult heroes (some over 300 years old) but my second book centers on a teenage heroine with typical teen problems: looking for a job, dealing with a wizard who likes her, and ghosts invading her house. Well, typical teen problems if you live in Waterdeep :)

Tanith Lee is one of the authors impossible to pigeonhole. She slips all over the border between science fiction, fantasy, and horror. If one of her books doesn't fit your mood, try something else. "Biting the Sun" (which collects two novellas) is a personal favorite. Try daughterofthenight.com to see an incredible bibliography of Lee's work from 1968 to present.

If you like Robin Hobb, try her earlier works as Megan Lindholm too. Wizard of Pigeons is an amazing novel and pretty good tour through a now gone downtown Seattle.

I'm also very fond of Rachel Caine, both her Weather Warden series and the Morganville books.

Don't forget the "kids's books" by Pratchett that are also Discworld. The three Tiffany Aching books are a definite trilogy about the training of a young witch (with drop-ins from many favorites from other novels) and work well as an introduction to the Discworld ideas.

The Amazing Maurice is a stand-alone and a funny retake on the Pied Piper legend from a rat's point of view.

As everyone has observed, YA is a fuzzy category based more on the publisher's perception of the probable audience than anything else. You will find books published for the adult market shifted into the YA market and vice versa just depending on the publisher -- Andre Norton's Witch World and other science fiction series are a prime example. Her early books were published as Ace paperbacks for adults in the 1960s. Later hardbacks were always shelved in the YA section (Viking in the 1970s). Then, again, back into hardback for the adult market (Tor in the 1980s and beyoned).

I just finished the proofing the final layout for ENCYCLOPEDIA OF COLLECTIBLE CHILDREN'S BOOKS (out sometime in the Fall from Collector Books). My co-author and I had many, many discussions of what to include. We usually decided to add YA and even some titles/series originally published for adults that appealed to collectors of children's fiction.

Terry Pratchett's adult novels do work as stand-alone books. You can drop into Discworld at any point. When I'm trying to get people started on Pratchett, I tend to hand them "Small Gods" or "Guards, Guards."

Within the larger list, there are definite arcs, continuing characters, and oft-repeated funny bits. There's a bunch of websites detailing which books deal with which characters.

Hogfather (which was recently adapted for TV) is one of three books about Susan, Death's granddaughter.

Since Steven Brust has been mentioned, don't forget THE GYPSY, a novel that he co-wrote with Megan Lindholm (who now writes as Robin Hobb). Another favorite Lindholm title is WIZARD OF PIGEONS. Both of these books have gone in and out of print, but it's worth hunting down a copy.

Somewhere once, somebody (probably Greg Bear) said science fiction is mostly probable and can be explained by the physics of our reality, with maybe only one really impossible element in the story.

Fantasy on the other hand works on its own terms. Magic just does what magic does as the author defines it.

Science fantasy seems like a good label for those books with the great science fiction themes (rockets, ray guns, aliens) but gives the author more leeway to play with those fantasy elements (magic, barbarian princesses) without worrying quite as much about the physics as the "hard-core" science fiction.

For me, the granddaddy of this style is Edgar Rice Burroughs' Princess of Mars. S.M. Stirling's new books like The Sky People are a definite and appealing homage to this style.

Sheri Tepper's True Game series (and related books) would be another fantasy with a great underlying "science fiction" explanation that doesn't appear until late in the story.