Remarks on the Didactic Novel for Youngsters

[beamjockey]

So Cory Doctorow's novel Little Brother is now on the streets, and people are discussing it. I want to reprint some (spoiler-free) remarks I posted over at Making Light, the blog of Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden.

I responded to a comment by Lola Raincoat (warning: link may lead to spoilers), who writes:

Little Brother definitely has its heart in the right place, being a young adult novel about post-9/11 restrictions on civil liberties and how much that sucks, but the story gets hijacked by gizmo-worship. It's all, hey kids! here's how to build your own surveillence-free internet on your X-Boxes! here's how to subvert the tracking functions on your bus pass! here's how to have fun with a flash mob! So it ends up being, basically, Wired Magazine Escapes from Guantanamo Bay.

First, I think this is an accurate and eloquent description.

Second, I am a reader who would enjoy reading Wired Magazine Escapes from Guantanamo Bay. I infer that Lola is not.

There is a long tradition of novels for young people that contain an iron fist of instruction within a velvet glove of entertainment.

You can write a book like The Boy Electrician and teach kids how to wind coils. And some kids will read it. And some of those will build some of the experiments.

But you can also write a book where heroes who understand radio and electricity go off and have adventures finding the lost city of gold in the Andes. Where radio saves their bacon, and electrical knowledge allows them to build a gadget that helps catch the villain.

The second kind of book will make some readers want to wind coils.

Such readers will get hold of The Boy Electrician. After more trips to the hardware store, and more trips to the library, they get a ham license, or rig the sound and lighting for the school play.

I recently read Fred Erisman's Boys’ Books, Boys’ Dreams, and the Mystique of Flight, which is all about series aviation novels for U.S. boys, published from around 1910 until around 1960.* They vary a lot, of course, but a common urge found in them is to inspire excitement about aviation and "air-mindedness" in the reader.

Or, in the words of a later era, making aviation seem cool.

One of Hugo Gernsback's goals, in publishing fiction for his audience of electrical hobbyists, and later in creating the first science fiction magazine, was to get readers involved in science and technology by seducing them through entertainment. Another goal was to teach science in the stories themselves, at which he was perhaps less successful.

Nevertheless science fiction became a shared literature of the technoculture, right up through the Internet age. In the early Forties, the Manhattan Project was a dark secret, but the staff at Astounding noticed that they had somehow acquired more subscribers in Oak Ridge, Tennessee than in Boston, Massachusetts.

Poke around in the autobiographies of scientists, engineers, and programmers, and you'll find that a lot of them really did read juvenile gadget fiction, and really did wind the coils.

Tom Swift, the fictional boy inventor, was on Robert Heinlein's mind when he wrote a proposal for a series of juvenile novels in 1946. Series books of that sort, many of them filled with gadgets, were everywhere in Heinlein's youth.

He had just spent a frustrating year writing crusading articles to warn Americans about the dangers of atomic war and the unpleasant alternatives, urging that an international agency be formed to take control of nuclear weapons and technology. He couldn't sell them. He turned to books for kids. He called the series The Young Atomic Engineers, and the first one would involve a group of technically-skillful teenage boys in building and flying a nuclear-powered rocket to the Moon. This became Rocket Ship Galileo.

He gave up the idea of a Tom Swift-style series, but he kept writing for teenagers. His next novel was Space Cadet, about a young man who works for an international agency formed to take control of nuclear weapons...

Again and again in Heinlein's juvenile novels, understanding how stuff works is shown to be admirable and desirable. Circumscribed within the notions editors and teachers and librarians have about books that will sell to kids, Heinlein says: Study your math. Learn about the atom. Here's how relativity works. Smart engineers can improvise a solution. The solar system is your home.

Science fiction offers a huge number of other examples we could point to, but Heinlein is the leader here. He is certainly a role model for Cory Doctorow in writing Little Brother.

Now I could imagine "a young adult novel about post-9/11 restrictions on civil liberties and how much that sucks" which does not descend into "gizmo-worship." But that novel couldn't be written by Cory Doctorow, who is a gadget-happy, let-me-explain-it-to-you kind of guy.

I liked the book very much. I did read with one eye on its didactic purposes and its infodumps. Obviously its success hinges (as with so many other stories aimed at piquing the interest of the techie reader) on how skillfully it balances storytelling with here's-how instruction. It seems to me to work.

I am a guy who has read every single issue of Wired, though. So YMMV.

*It's quite good, but I don't expect very many Making Light readers to be interested in this topic at book length. Also, Erisman limits himself to series novels, so no standalones; U.S. only, so no Biggles; boys only, so none of the relatively few girl-aviatrix series.

Comments

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

Tangentially, a couple of years ago, I ran into a copy of Citizen of the Galaxy, and picked it up. I hadn't read it in perhaps generations, but it held up completely. The biggest difference was that now the checklist of educational points was transparently visible. (Most interesting was the illustration, very show-don't-tell, that sexism is really stupid . . . published in 1957.)
When I run into more of the juveniles, I'll see if the lesson plans stick out as clearly.

Meanwhile, the question persists, How can we ignite intellectual fires?

[n6tqs.livejournal.com]

I had problems with the didactic bits at first, and I'd just finished catching up with Carl And Jerry!. But I got totally drawn into the story, so much so, when I was interrupted by real life, it was disorienting. Note that I already have the BART "arfid" Pass, as part of the pilot program, and I used it to get to 16th and Mission tonight and came home from 24th and Mission.

I want to know where he got Turkish coffee on 24th, though.

The epitome of hidden didactiness (if that's a word) is Arthur Ransome- any number of people have learned how to sail from his books, but none of that information is blatant.

PS, note that I have a credit in the last 4 C&J books, thanks to you.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

I am *so* with you and have just spend 4 years and 120,000 words explaining why adults saying "x is too didactic" simply misses the points that a) kids love info, it's adults who are scared of it; and b) that the sf child (and also the proto-history student) loves didacticism, and doesn't care how clumsy it is as long as s/he learns something.

Apologies for the plug, but the book is called The Inter-Galactic Playground and will be out in 2009.

I've been reading Bevis this week, a nineteenth century story of boyhood by Richard Jeffries, and adored all the instruction parts about swimming and making a boat.

[n6tqs.livejournal.com]

I've also read Bevis (it probably informed Ransome's writing), and rather enjoyed it, but am appalled at some of the things that were done. Two Little Savages is rather more readable, I think.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Yeah, boys not nice.

I never quite took to Ransome, but adored a historical writer called Ronald Welch, for the detail and the practicality.

[unkbar.livejournal.com]

Amen, Brother. Tell it!

[min0taur.livejournal.com]

I only got as far as "Tom Swift, Jr. and His Triphibian Atomicar" (1961). I'm still waiting for "Tom Swift, Jr. and Sandy Swift [remember his sister?] Build the L5 Utopia."

[richardthe23rd.livejournal.com]

Speaking of tangents, Fred Erisman taught my Science Fiction class at Texas Christian University. A few years later, he and another of my lit profs showed up on programming at the Austin NASFiC.

[brian-s.livejournal.com]

Just in case you hadn't heard, Bill, Cory Doctorow is going to be in Naperville this coming Wednesday at Anderson's Bookshop. I'm planning on being there.

Anderson’s Bookshops, Naperville, IL
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
7:00 pm

123 West Jefferson Avenue
Naperville, IL 60540

http://us.macmillan.com/Tour.aspx?id=51&publisher=torforge

[fjm.livejournal.com]

This might interest you: http://www.farahsf.com/outofthis.htm

There is also a short piece there about science books for kids.