Back when I was young, SF was a comparatively obscure genre. Many librarians assumed that it was all kid stuff, and filed it as such. Consequence: I was allowed to check out and read books that would otherwise have been considered totally inappropriate for young kids1. Which is not to say I didn’t benefit from reading some of those books, but I am pretty sure that if my librarians and teachers2 had had any idea what those books were, they would have been aghast. (Possibly two ghasts!)
Some librarians must have grokked that some of Heinlein’s books were kinda racy. At least, someone seems to have been sorting them into kids’ and adult books, in my experience: stuff like Stranger in a Stranger Land or I Will Fear No Evil went upstairs, where only the adults and suitable mature teens were allowed. (I can’t recall how old you had to be to check out the adult-ish books, but I do remember it was annoyingly old from my perspective.) There were, however, occasionally bugs in the sorting system; Farnham’s Freehold ended up down in the kids’ section. The first part was fairly conventional: After the Bomb meets Incest: Not Just for Ancient Egyptians Anymore. But then it morphed into…how to put this politely? A racist work I don’t imagine that anyone would benefit from reading. Much less a ten-year-old.
Some books on the effects of nuclear weapons (not SF, but SF-adjacent) did make it into the kids’ section. These were not the delightfully math-heavy versions I discovered in high school. But the books did have pictures, as children’s books should… these were pictures from places like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or from boats like the Lucky Dragon. When, years later, I encountered H. Beam Piper’s fiction, those pictures helped me appreciate the effects of Piper’s hellburner missiles on a visceral level. When I was six, the books helped me worry about planes overhead …which might be preparing to drop the Bomb on us.
My grade school3 had a policy NOT to buy books aimed at readers above a certain age. Again, though, the system wasn’t perfect. As well as Jeff and Jean Sutton’s The Beyond and various Franklin W. Dixon books, they stocked the full version of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. That may have been due to someone’s notion that kids should know that the expurgated picture-book version (also stocked) was not the real thing.
Moby Dick isn’t SF, but the manner in which it includes readers—infodumps the size of the white whale itself—may have predisposed me to like SF. Which, as you know, Bob, is also prone to humongous infodumps. Trying to read Melville in grade four may also have pre-adapted me for life as a reviewer: I understood early that life is too short to finish reading everything I begin.
How Norman Spinrad’s The Men in the Jungle, which features drugs, violence, and infanticide, made it into the children’s section, I don’t know. Is there anything by Spinrad that is child-friendly? That was indeed a traumatizing book to encounter when I was prepared for something more along the lines of Blast-off at Woomera. If I think about that Spinrad book now (even though I am older and somewhat hardened) I still feel queasy.
James Blish’s Star Trek script adaptations put him firmly into the children’s section as far as public libraries were concerned. It must have seemed only logical to place next to those books Blish’s other work, including his theological SF novels (A Case of Conscience, Black Easter), not to mention the more-sexist-every-time-I-read-it And All the Stars a Stage. Ah well, doubtless reading these books built character … if understood. Perhaps they were just baffling.
On the beneficial side of the ledger:
Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage probably looked fairly safe to the library’s gatekeepers. For the most part it fits nicely into the coming of age mold of so many YA SF novels. It was a little surprising when the young protagonist has sex with another tween during the rite of passage… but that was character development, not titillation. The plot development that did surprise me was the abrupt genocide inflicted on one helpless world. Mia, the novel’s protagonist, decides that all people are people, not just those on her privileged class, and that mass murder, even if the folks on the planet are free-birthers, is wrong. That’s not a bad moral for a book. I also appreciated Mia’s conviction that even long-established rules can be changed by sufficiently determined activists.
Earthsea established Ursula Le Guin as a kid’s author as far as the local authorities were concerned. Every fiction book she wrote ended up on the ground floor of Waterloo Public Library, where the young people’s books lived. This is where I first encountered The Left Hand of Darkness. Genly Ai’s adventure on an ice-covered world populated by people of varying biological sex was certainly an interesting change of pace from Freddy and the Baseball Team from Mars, The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, and Star Man’s Son, 2250 A.D.
I never questioned the Le Guin policy; never asked the librarians, “Have you actually read these books?” This was payback. Supposedly wise adults had introduced us young’uns to apparently age-appropriate works like Old Yeller (the beloved dog dies), The Bridge to Terabitha (the beloved friend dies), and The Red Balloon (the magical balloon dies). Not to mention On the Beach, in which everyone dies AND the romance plot fizzles (because the romantic leads die). If their oversight greatly expanded the range of subjects found in the children’s section beyond a seemingly endless cavalcade of sudden tragedy, I wasn’t going to spoil the game by pointing their error out to them.
Buy the Book
Worlds Seen in Passing: Ten Years of Tor.com Short Fiction
1: Books that looked anodyne but weren’t were counterbalanced by all the non-sexy books with covers depicting naked people (naked people who appeared nowhere in the book—trust me, I checked). I could offer examples (the gratuitous bare-breasted cover for The Flying Mountains, the naked-woman cover of Methuselah’s Children, the full-frontal guy on that one cover of Stand on Zanzibar) but I am not sure Tor.com wants to post NSFW art.
2: My parents let us read anything we wanted, which is why the first stories I read from Arthur C. Clarke and from Larry Niven were in the December 1971 and August 1970 issues of Playboy, respectively. It’s also why, when my school assigned us The Pearl, it would have been very useful if they had specified “the John Steinbeck novel, not the well-known publication reprinted by Grove Press.” Beforehand, I mean. I understood my error after the fact.
3: North Wilmot, I mean. My previous school, Josephsberg, had a tiny library (supplemented by the occasional bookmobile) and the filter was more effective there because there were fewer books to filter. That said, I still recall reading a graphic, horrifying history of Fulgencio Batista, so it wasn’t completely trauma-free.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nomineeJames Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is surprisingly flammable.
One of the first SF novels I read (at age 11) was TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE.
So, yeah…
Just tell the librarians it’s a romance novel. Which I guess it is, in a sense.
My high school library had Vinge’s “The Snow Queen”. I was pretty sheltered at that age, and I was riveted by the story. . .but it was probably the most explicit fiction I’d read at that age. It was a really conservative community. I think maybe the librarian hadn’t read it haha.
Oh, and my 8th grade teacher’s collection of Pern books. Not Harper Hall–main series Pern books.
I was lucky — once I demonstrated to the satisfaction of the local librarians that there was no science fiction or fantasy that I hadn’t read in the children’s section (and a lot of other stuff as well — talk to me about Brumbies and Meindert De Jong and some weird thing that apparently wasn’t fantasy but had children ascending a crystal mountain that had a witchdoctor at the top) and that I could talk intelligently about what I’d read and why I did or didn’t like it, I was allowed to borrow from the adult section. I was 10 and above at the time, in the late 60s and early 70s and my mother took the view — as she explained to the librarians — that you would never recognise good writing it you didn’t read boring stuff and/or rubbish as well.
The titles had to be vetted at checkout but the magic yellow cover and/or a reference to SF, Sci-Fi! or Fantasy was always sufficient. So Samuel Delany and LeGuin and Zelazny qualified as did Brunner and Niven, and a load of stuff I’ve probably forgotten because it fell under my then-definition of crap (including Heinlein and some Niven) and boring (Asimov, most Clarke). No Russ, alas — I had to wait until I was allowed to go to bookshops on my own. But I did at lest manage to encounter the greats (and not-so-greats) and reinforce a life-long habit.
The Dolley Madison Library in McLean Va, part of the Fairfax County system, no longer has a separate SF section. :-( But when it did the librarians didn’t impose any sort of age restrictions that I encountered on who could check out the books. They may not have realized… Come to think of it, I don’t recall ever checking anything out of the kids section, though there was a young adult section. My high school had a fairly decent SF selection, which was where I first encountered H. Beam Piper. But by the time I was 13 I had a lawn mowing job, and other income, and bought more than checked out. By 16 I was heading to Hole in the Wall Books in Falls Church Va (still there!) for my genre needs. Best used SF bookstore in the DC area.
Two books that were inappropriate for preteen boys that were recommended by librarians were Grendel and The Forgotten Beasts of Eld.
Up until age eleven (when we moved) my school library was pitiful. But the town library, despite being small and in a small rural town, had a very good selection. It also had something I now know to be a treasure beyond compare: a librarian who led kids read whatever they wanted as long as it was on-site and taught kids how to use the card catalog and the microfiche machine, and how to make inter-library requests. This was in the late 60s and early 70s. I don’t think most parents understood what the librarian was allowing their kids to access…
My first clear SF memory is “The HORARs of War” by Gene Wolfe at about age seven or eight; my first clear SF novel is “The Left Hand of Darkness” at age nine.
My middle school library introduced me to Anne McCaffrey’s Pern novels, Piers Anthony’s Battle Circle, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, and Orwell’s 1984, but the librarians never showed any concerns about handing these books over to a 12-year-old. I think they were just glad I was reading.
@wiredog Hole in the Wall Books is the best, and I hate that we moved so far away from it. I haven’t found anything that good in RI yet.
Pearl is also the title of a tremendously sad Middle English allierative poem in which a man struggles to come to terms with the death of his little daughter, his Pearl.
My middle school opened in 1973, and my sixth-grade year was one year after that. The librarian, Mrs. Weller, had a wonderful taste in F/SF, including Susan Cooper, Lloyd Alexander, Nourse’s “Blade Runner” (adult concepts but not explicit), John Christopher… and Robert Heinlein. Right next to “The Star Beast” was “Stranger in a Strange Land”. Kinda blew my 11-year-old mind. And this is in a district where they still argued whether “Hucklelberry Finn” should be on the shelves.
OK, so I typed and edited my comment in Notepad so I could get it right the first time, but this field won’t accept pasted text–???
The worst thing I remember finding in the children’s section was Robert Bloch’s Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper. But since it was included in one of those Alfred Hitchcock anthologies aimed at the younger set, I can’t really blame the librarians.
And then, shortly thereafter, I was browsing the paperback spinners in the adult SF section, and found this book with this amazing cover that I just had to take home and …
Oh I can relate to this.
Our children’s section was fairly well policed by librarians who actually read all the selections, but just because something is a childrens book in terms of language doesn’t make it wholesome – Douglas Hill for example had racial genocide, suicide, lingering terminal illness, alien invasion and cannibalism, and a whole lot of rebelling against fascist states. (Last Legionary, Blade of the Poisoner, Warriors of the Wasteland, Colsec).
Once I finished the whole children’s section though at around the age of 9 or 10 I was straight into the adults – I skipped the YA area as being all message fiction and emotional rubbish. I vividly remember Black Easter – that was dark as heck. I also remember Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis series, and I think I had some definite second looks putting Adulthood Rites on the counter at around age 12.
I don’t know if this is true or not (memory makes liars of us all)… but I recall that Heinlein was asked how one wrote good books for young folk (e.g. Podkayne of Mars or Space Cadet) and he said, “Write a book for adults and edit out the sex.” Well… someone failed in Farmham’s Freehold to edit out the nasty ugly racist propaganda. I remember the book quite well, and still horrified by it… It is interesting to chart Heinlein’s writing career. As time went on, he wrote more and more about sex and sexuality in less and less guarded ways that meant that his work was clearly not being edited for young folk… yet, as this essay suggests… librarians failed to note that. Further, the less guarded he became… the more of his own, IMHO, his true sexuality came through… to wit, he was very likely autogynephilic… that he was aroused by the fantasy of becoming female!
One of the more amusing (in retrospect) incidents from my 2nd Grade year involved the school librarian not allowing me to check out a book on the “advanced reader” shelf. If I recall correctly, it was either “Freckle Juice” or “Ramona Quimby”. They were deemed “too hard” for all but the “gifted” kids.
I ended up rooting through the shelves on my own and picking up a copy of “Tales from the Arabian Nights” and eventually “The Blue Fairy Book” instead. Those books were hard to read by myself, but I had a dictionary. Looking back on it, pouring boiling oil on your enemies and being carried away by giant birds is far more interesting than anything that was on that forbidden shelf anyway. So that condescending librarian inadvertently did me a favor and sparked an interest in folklore that survives to this day.
@12, Oh my! Did it give you nightmares?
@16 — Yes! Not the cover per se, but the title story in particular, which creeps me out to this day.
My fifth grade English teacher thought I was ready for “Slaughterhouse Five.” Never looked back.
I think someone had done a good job of weeding out the books in the children’s section at my local library*, but clearly someone had looked at the graphic novels, and assumed that there were cartoons and therefore fine for all ages. I seem to remember that the graphic version of Dragonflight was, well, graphic…
The other graphic novel I found there was The Light Fantastic, which wasn’t racy (or at least I didn’t understand those jokes at the time), but it did start me reading Pratchett, for which I will be forever grateful.
* I seem to remember my mum talking the librarian into upping my borrowing limit to four books. Four whole books a week! That would keep me going at least four days!
Happily, a local anime fan noticed the local video store had stuck Urotsukidōji into the kids’ section before anyone rented it.
I’ve been thinking lately… I’m old enough that YA wasn’t the big thing that it is now. Now, you could read YA well into adulthood and never run out. Back when I was a kid, when you were done with picture books, Nancy Drew, and so forth, you were about done. (Also, no ebooks then, I read what was physically at the local library or at home.
So when I was done with Nancy Drew, I just started reading Vonnegut, Douglas Adams Heinlein and classics (Jane Austen, Twain, Hawthorn). I never really encountered a librarian that didn’t let me have things.
I’m not sure it was a bad thing. There was stuff that I read that I missed a level of it. And there was stuff that was a helluva education. But I was certainly challenged.
12: that cover looks rather jolly. I like the tentacle with the trumpet bells sticking out of it. He looks like he’s about to start playing a tune.
The first book I borrowed from my school library was Nineteen Eighty Four, at the age of nine, which may have been a bit young. I enjoyed it though.
I didn’t care for Nineteen Eighty Four but Orwell’s collected journalism caught my attention.
Small town in the 70s. The librarians knew that I had tested at a post-college reading level by 2nd grade so they stopped limiting me to the children’s section by the time I was 10. The elderly librarian didn’t believe SF was appropriate for girls and forced me to balance my SF checkouts with romance novels. She didn’t seem to realize that romances were no longer the chaste books of her youth. (You would have thought the clinch covers to be a clue). Compared to the rapey abuse in the 70s-era bodice-rippers whatever inappropriateness I came across in the SF/Fantasy I picked up never even registered. I don’t know why no one questioned the idea that age appropriateness and reading level were the same.
I remember when Galaxy Magazine serialized I Will Fear No Evil by Robert Heinlein, which was full of all sorts of sex and gender bending, and other weird stuff. My dad saw me with the magazine, asked what I was reading, then turned red and said, “If there’s anything you read in that story that you want to talk about, just let me know.” As if I would want to talk about that stuff with my father!
(In retrospect, however, I realize that I would have been far better off discussing it with my father rather than my friends from school.)
The one I got in trouble for was Piers Anthony – I’d been through all of Xanth and grabbed And Eternity (the last of the Incarnations of Immortality series). I clearly remember writing the definition of “pimp” in my sixth grade reading journal and my teacher being very concerned about whether my parents knew what I was reading.
I was astounded on rereading the Heinlein juvvies to discover RAH slipped an obvious reference to a john getting rolled by a prostitute past his editor.
@2: Thanks for the great Tom Lehrer quote!
Piers Anthony caused a bit of a ruckus at my school.
“Piers Anthony? He writes those Xanth books, right?” Which is true! He does. And Xanth is pretty firmly in YA territory and generally speaking considered ‘safe’ for Impressionable Young Minds by school librarians.
Anthony also wrote Firefly, which is most emphatically not in that same category. When I spotted it on the shelves in the library, I was enthusiastic — a new Anthony novel, hurray! Then I checked it out and read it.
Then, being at the time a rather obedient sort … I think I was twelve-ish? … I took it to the librarian and asked if she was sure it was OK to have that on the shelves, because, uh…. ummm….
To this day I wince a little every time I see that word, because Firefly-the-novel-by-Piers-Anthony and Firefly-the-show-that-I-adore are not in any way related to each other and oh god please don’t cross those streams…
My high school library had a pretty good SF section, with several current short story anthologies. However, “current” at the time meant a lot of New Wave. Meaning I might as well have been reading Ginsburg and William Burroughs, what with all the drugs and sex in those stories. It was great.
I spent most of my elementary school years in the Bronx. The NYC library did an excellent job of filtering. I first encountered science fiction with Isaac Asimov’s Lucky Starr series. That was all they had by Asimov. This filtering was undermined by subversive librarians. I got my first real library card a year younger than the rules allowed, and once I had the card, no one asked me about my age. The same was true later. The rule was that you had to be out of grade 8 to get an adult card. I was 11. But since the librarian gave me the card, I could take out any book I wanted. And as long as I could filter my description of what I was reading well enough, my parents didn’t pay much attention to what I was reading either.
I wouldn’t say Xanth was all that appropriate for kids, either, but yeah, not quite in the Firefly category.
The second fantasy series I read in 7th grade, pulled from the libraries shelf, right after Narnia was The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Wooo boy, that was one big leap.
I read my first SF at age eight, courtesy of the Beaverton public library. The librarians were great. I went from the kids books to the older kids books to the adult books to being allowed to rummage in the back room where they stored the books no one else wanted.
I don’t think my Chicago branch gatekept at all. There was a kid’s half but I spent most of my time raiding the adult SF shelves. If my parents had to approve an adult card or something, I don’t remember, I just remember checking out what I pleased. It took me a while to realize there *was* SF in the kid’s section…
I was known at my elementary school as the girl who could read anything and all of it quickly, so the school librarian pointed me to the new books every time I walked in. In third grade (I think), my main special interest was European folklore. You know those largish, thinnish, profusely illustrated, light-on-text books that explain a single topic, like whales or airplanes? One day the librarian pointed out a new one titled Witches.
By Erica Jong.
I was used to being blamed for things that had gone wrong if I dared to be the one to point them out, but I also knew that I had been the very first person to page all the way through the book, and that I had a duty, even if I was going to be called a pervert for knowing what was in the book. So I tremblingly approached the circulation desk and showed the librarian the full-page, full-color, full-frontal illustration of a woman in flagrante delicto with a goat that had held me transfixed like a mouse with a snake.
Luckily she wasn’t one of the adults who had taught me to be afraid of being noticed. Her eyebrows shot up, but she said nothing, and made the book disappear.
I got my library card in second grade. I was already reading at an adult level, the library had no policy on age appropriate books and my parents never checked. 7 skipped the children’s department and went directly to adults. I read all genres except horror so in addition to most of the books listed sbove, I also read Tess of the Dubervilles which dealt with sexual harassment, parents willing to risk their daughter on the altar of financial gain and rape and the Persian Boy by Mary Renault which dealt with a boy’s enslavement, castration and and sexual relationship with Alexander the Great. I was pretty confused and upset but not enough to mention anything to an adult. I don’t know if this was a good thing or not. It did result in my ability to accept a wider view towards race, religion and affectual preference. Due to our mutual love of love for SF, our trio was a female Wiccan, a Jewish man and a Baptist me.
Watership Down.
It’s a novel about cutesy litttle flopsy-bunnies, of course it’s a kid’s book.
(If a novel in which rabbits are intelligent, worship the sun, tell each other folkloric stories about their hero-prince, and are visited by Death in the form of the Black Rabbit, isn’t somewhere on the SF spectrum, what is?)
Um.
I read The Dispossessed and City of Illusions both before I was ten. My mother was a believer in letting children read what they like, it’ll either go over their heads or it’ll be fine. I am still a bit surprised in retrospect that she assumed because Earthsea was kid-appropriate everything Le Guin wrote must also have been kid-appropriate, but I am not at all sorry to have had so many of Le Guin’s earlier novels as part of the furniture of my mind from an extremely early age. Any more than I ever saw what was problematic about a little kid reading about the absolute destruction of Sandford Warren as told by two refugees.
I was reading science fiction by 7 or 8; I had carefully scoped out which of the Star Trek novelizations by James Blish had the most episodes before buying my first book ever. The first library SF books I read were collections of short stories that had been inexplicably filed in the children’s section, including the incomparable Tomorrow’s Children, which had gems like It’s a Good Life and The Menace from Earth. Luckily, the youth services librarian in my town was very understanding and didn’t bat an eye when I asked for whatever was new by Anne McCaffrey. She also pointed out that a lot of SF ended up in the YA area because no one really knew where to put it. From then on, it was all downhill :)
My daddwas a social worker, and my mom aa publi health nurse; by the age of 9, I had not only read Black Elk Speaks, but Everything You Wanted to Know about Sex.
I read the Xanth books. In one of them, they talked about how the centaurs came about. A group of soldiers with their mares got caught on Xanth and ran into some sort of love spell/plant/something. The centaurs were the offspring of these soldiers and mares. Not really child appropriate.
Same for Mccaffery. Her dragon riders had no choice but to mate when their dragons did. Took me a few years to figure it out.
I read everything and anything when I was a kid. A lot was not age appropriate, but I was a very mature child.
The first sci-fi book I remember reading was Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy which I found in my junior high’s little library. Afterwards I read every sf book I could find, but RAH was my favorite. I read everything he ever wrote. I loved the juveniles, particularly Citizen and Have Spacesuit — Will Travel. But by the time he got to the later adult books, it was like reading “Little Bobby Heinlein Discovers Sex”. Boring and rambling for the most part. Time after time he’d write himself into a corner, and just drop his plot and go off in a different direction. I’m in my mid-60s now and a couple of years ago I tried to re-read those books I loved in my teens and early 20s. I couldn’t do it. Still love my juveniles and The Puppet Masters but not much else.
“RAH slipped an obvious reference to a john getting rolled by a prostitute past his editor.”
Well, go on then…. which one?
James, surely Earth is a “world populated by people of varying biological sex“! The thing that would have made The Left Hand of Darkness more interesting for me as a kid than it did when I read it in my 50s was that they had variable biological sex. :-)
I don’t believe there’s such a thing as an age-inappropriate novel. Those racist & sexist works of early SF were no more appropriate for adults than for children. Those were, unfortunately, the times.
This isn’t SF, but when I was 10 I checked Word Play by Peter Farb out of my school library. It’s a popular-level intro to linguistics but is DEFINITELY for adults. I loved it but there was a whole chapter on dirty jokes, none of which I understood at the time. I spent my whole teen years getting the jokes, one by one.
Also, thanks for the earworm, @2.
49: I don’t mind at all having read the adult Le Guins as a kid but I am pretty sure the people behind the age segregation of the library would have been upset if they’d known what I was reading.
This one was in the general books. Being by and large an obedient child, I didn’t think to point it out to the librarians, because I had been warned early on that people who read in the general section must expect to see the full spectrum of the human condition. But I still wonder if they knew what was in it.
For those who don’t already know, the “Arabian Nights” that many of us grew up reading are a condensed children’s version of a medieval book, The Thousand and One Nights, that was written for adults. It was passed around in manuscript and different copies have different additions, not only tacking on the adventures of Sinbad the Sailor from a separate medieval book, but also adding whatever the local audience might like–because it was often read aloud. I have read Haddawy’s translation of Mahdi’s version that purports to pare away everything but the original cohesive text, and it does hang together as a bawdy, romantic, and absorbing book. The bigotry, ableism, and sexism mark it as definitely of its time, but it’s easy to see why people liked it enough to copy the whole thing.
That was…not the edition they had on the shelves at my public library. It wasn’t Burton either; Burton’s edition has so many leering, smirking footnotes about sexual mutilation and rape that it turns my stomach. But it was bad enough. I was attracted to it because it was four whole volumes of “Arabian Nights,” translated into French by Mardrus and then into English by Mathers. As I posted above, I do read very fast.
Here’s a non-exhaustive list of things that later editors added to spice up the original Thousand Nights: men having fun talking about all the ways in which women are subhuman, men making virginal secluded women talk about sex for the lulz, fathers molesting sons and laughing about it, men raping animals small enough to be badly hurt, and a fornicating couple getting rid of the woman’s husband by torturing him to death in a way that implies that he is an animal but it’s OK because he’s Jewish. Note that none of the people who do these horrible things is ever portrayed as getting, or even deserving, comeuppance.
Also note that the Mahdi and Haddawy edition of The Nights is about half as long, even adding back in the non-original stories that are now regarded as classics.
The past is another country, and sometimes it’s full of scumbags who like to get together and watch one another’s faces as they all listen to a story about how much fun it is to be a monster.
I remember trying to read my Grandfather’s unexpurgated Arabian Nights – not sure which translation – at eight. I couldn’t understand most of the bawdry and gave it up
Several of these stories are making me chuckle. Although I’ll also throw my lot in with those that say Xanth isn’t appropriate for kids either. A friend of mine who loves the books got me the first three as a book and I found A Spell for Chameleon so deeply offensive and misogynistic that I never read another word he wrote. And this when I was in grad school!
I was a pretty voracious reader as well (tested at a college level at some point in elementary school) but I guess I was just kinda boring because I don’t remember reading anything particularly tawdry in my youth. Well, actually I think I did read both Oliver Twist and Jane Eyre in middle school but a lot of it went right over my head.
That said I did sneak RL Stine books and Christopher Pike books and other various horror books from the spinner in the library. But my love of genre stuff didn’t really kick off until I read The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings in sixth grade.
My high school library had both “Dangerous Visions” and “Again, Dangerous Visions.”
I read Vonda McIntyre’s Dreamsnake out of my middle school’s library!!
One of the more alarming books North Wilmot Public School was a fairly graphic history of Jack the Ripper, which left out what the victims did for a living but left in the details of their murders. Someone somewhere seemed to have thought “Kids these days really need to know about the Ripper murders!” The part that alarmed me as an 11 year old was that he was never caught. It hadn’t occurred to me people could transgress and never be punished.
My father was a high school librarian. He and my mother never policed what we read. Ever. There was one incident where he picked up something I had been reading and told me there was no way I could possibly be understanding it. I sat down and broke out the plot, the subplot, the characters, where I felt the book was going, how I would write it and where I disagreed with the author. He simply handed the book back to me and walked away. I was 8. That was the same year I received my adult library card. And the librarians never questioned my choices.
My nomination for best bunch of librarians goes to those in Jo Walton’s Among Others who provide Morwena with an endless supply of reading matter.
I’m not sure if it’s unsuitable for children but I read the Illiad in elementary school because it was in the library and I was in a greek mythology phase.
I remember reading a book as a kid that listed some of the wonders of the galaxy; I think it was something by Sturgeon. One of the wonders of the galaxy was said to be “The Copulation Pits of Venus.” I looked up from my book and asked, “Mom, what’s ‘copulation’ mean?” My mother almost fell over. :-)
Oh, Piers Anthony… responsible for SO MUCH of the internalized misogyny and twisted misunderstandings of consent that I had to unpack as I got older.
My dad gave me a copy of A Spell for Chameleon when I was maybe 10 because “light funny fantasy!” and I’ve unfortunately always been a completionist. I was twelve when I started reading the Bio of a Space Tyrant series. I read an anthology of his stories (yes, including “In the Barn”) AND Firefly when I was still in my middle teens.
Thankfully, that was about the point at which I realized that I was allowed to change my mind about an author and I wasn’t actually *obligated* to keep reading them just because I’d liked them in the past.
It still took years for me truly to understand just how ugly and toxic his worldbuilding and writing were. :/
William Sleator’s “House of Stairs” freaked me out good as a young sci-fi reader. Technically, it IS classified a YA book, but his stuff is just WEIRD. Around the same time I read “Amy’s Eyes,” by Richard Kennedy — another that is kind of YA, but also kind of NOT. And again, SUPER bizarre.
I never have gotten why people think that Farnham’s Freehold is racist. It was always obvious to me that it was intended to hold a mirror up in racism’s face and make it look at itself. I think I was 12 when I read it, and got that right away. Maybe it’s only obvious to people who were born when Jim Crow was still a thing.
@28 “an obvious reference to a john getting rolled by a prostitute” Sorry, I’m drawing a blank. Where was this?
The original trilogy Dragonriders of Pern were definitely on my primary school library shelves, and, uh… yeah. The first two were, anyway– finding a library that had a copy of The White Dragon was really, weirdly difficult.
I’m certain that i pulled a copy of A Clockwork Orange off the spinner at school when I was in grade 5, given the cover that I remember having a halved orange, filled with circuitry, and the AMAZING scolding that I got from the librarian. Lady, you were the one who put that book on the shelf!
@62 – it’s funny you mention being a completist, because Piers Anthony is part of what broke that habit for me too, lol. God, I hated that book.
I spent an ungodly amount of time in the library’s sci-fi/fantasy paperback section as a kid. I read Blish’s Black Easter and thought it was the coolest thing I had ever read up to that point. I also was exposed to the stories of Robert E. Howard and H.P Lovecraft–with all the violence, racism and sexism intact. Any kid bringing that stuff home today would cause an international incident.
65: Accusing black people of obligate cannibalism is so much a thing for racists, George Fitzhugh’s well known pro-slavery tract had the title “Cannibals All! Or Slaves Without Masters”. This isn’t a old timey thing, either: in 2001 Toronto’s Mayor Lastman failed to win hearts and minds when he said … actually, I don’t want this nuked by the moderator so rot13 for racism:
“Jung gur uryy jbhyq V jnag gb tb gb n cynpr yvxr Zbzonfn sbe?…V whfg frr zlfrys va n cbg bs obvyvat jngre jvgu nyy gurfr angvirf qnapvat nebhaq zr.”
The john being rolled is from Starman Jones.
At the bar Dolores was smiling and gesturing at the assistant navigator to join her. Simes focused his eyes, grinned and said, “Why, so I do! It’s my Great Aunt Sadie.” He got up abruptly.
Sam brushed his hands together. “That disposes of that. Give you a bad time, kid?”
“Sort of. Thanks, Sam. But I hate to see him dumped on Dolores. She’s a nice kid.”
“Don’t worry about her. She’ll roll him for every thin he has on him–and a good job, too.”
That was my library, too! I can still remember where my first SF read was located on the shelf (Star Man’s Son, 2250 A.D). After that, I read almost nothing but SF for the next ten or twelve years. I don’t remember when my SF period started, but it must have been fairly early, because I had read my way through all the Heinlein juveniles, by the time I was 12, which is when I read Stranger in a Strange Land, probably the first one that was definitely not a children’s or juvenile book. But I don’t remember if it was shelved downstairs, or if I was reading upstairs books by that time. This would be in the late 1960s. The last time I visited that library (maybe about 10 yrs ago), the bottom floor was arranged differently – there was a whole big YA section toward the Dupont St. side. I don’t remember YA being separate when I was young, but it might have been and I never noticed.
My Catholic grade school’s bookshelf (not even a library) was… curated. Boring. Certainly no SF or horror. I’d read some truly terrible kiddie SF, and the Star Wars novelization, a little other trash.
But bookstores and the Public Library didn’t age-gate me. By 8? I’d read Heinlein’s Green Hills of Earth, which I think of as my first “real” SF, and I’d found the SF/F section and started devouring it, starting from Brian Aldiss’s Galactic Empires (with fully-exposed tits on the cover, which I was vaguely embarrassed by but not enough to put it back), and then following all the authors in it, which rapidly led into some overly adult waters. Back issues of pulp magazines were generally “safe” but not always, as in Galaxy.
I remember the first book that made me loathe an author: I’d read a couple books I liked by Damon Knight, and then I read A for Anything; I was probably 11 or 12? Yeah, I didn’t need to read his slavery wank fantasies.
Piers Anthony’s porno books in my early teens didn’t put me off as much; I’d read a couple Xanth books, got the joke, moved on to Anthology and Bio of a Space Tyrant and stopped, pulled back and read Macroscope, Chthon, Incarnations, and Split Infinity series, which are all fine (or at least didn’t bother me like Bio’s Haitian refugee rape raft; Bio has an artistic purpose illustrating how the richest country in the world does nothing to protect refugees then or now, but I don’t like it).
I know I saw Stephen Donaldson’s books early on, but didn’t read them until much later because by then I’d learned “reviews” were a good idea. When I did read them in my late teens/early 20s, I loved them, but certainly not to be shelved near kids.
@69 I humbly submit that you are reading something extra into the text when you call it “accusing of obligate cannibalism (emphasis added).” It is probably pointless for me to make the argument: I suspect your mind is made up on this matter. But I suggest FF was meant to be read as an answer to the white supremacists like Fitzhugh: all of their opinions about the inferiority of blacks would apply just as exactly to whites if the shoe were on the other foot. Though he was too clever for his own good by having the blacks treat the whites as actual food animals.
As to the rolling, Starman Jones was probably the juvie that I reread the fewest times. Along with FF I found it probably the least-enjoyable of his works before I Will Fear No Evil. I should have suspected it was the source just on those grounds.
When I read Farnham’s Freehold in junior high I took it as an indictment of current racism, not an endorsement of it.
I too had great librarians in elementary and middle school, who made sure that my vocabulary was up to the challenge and I wasn’t, say, checking out books I could read and giving them to kids who couldn’t – and then let me have the run of the place. I too read the Pern and Xanth books at single-digit ages as well as others mentioned here. The sex did go over my head but it hovered for a while and dropped like a ton of bricks a few years later …
@74, It’s not science fiction but I read a scholarly adult biography of Elizabeth I when I was about seven. It was the beginning of a lifelong obsession but now I look back at the frank outline of Henry VIII’s marital life and Elizabeth’s probable sexual hangups derived from same and wonder exactly what I made of it at seven. I think it must have gone right over my head until I was old enough to understand
Speaking as someone whose gender does not align with the one assigned at birth, the idea that challenging gender is an inherently adult concept and one necessitating caution lest children be exposed to it is one that serves those who wish to marginalize us. Ugh. I wish this didn’t happen.
I picked up Watership Down when I wad 8 (big fan of the movie) and read it 13 times by the time I was 10. Definitely didn’t harm me, although parts of it scared the crap out of me (as did the movie; let’s be real, the visual representation of Holly’s experiences escaping the gassing of the home warren was absolutely horrifying).
I was allowed to read anything I wanted from the books in our home, provided I could reach them on the shelf. Being a shifty character, and also very shiort and therefore certain that this rule was more unfair to me than to my taller sister, I took it as a challnge, moved a kitchen chair into the study, and got into the highest shelf I could find.
God alone knows why *my parents* of all people possessed a copy of De Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, but they did, and at the age of 10 I read a good chunk of it. It was awful, and not in a traumatizing way, just . . . boring as hell, especially the more shockingly deviant bits. (I read all of it recently and still hold the opinion that De Sade was mosrly just tiresome.) There was nothing interesting there, so I put it down. No harm done. I gave it to my sister to re-shelve. She was somewhat older, and was both horrified and amused at what I had done. She didn’t tell my folks but we did talk about the book and what was in it, and who De Sade was. I think THAT was the most important thing.
Honestly, Piers Anthony’s casual horrendous sexism was worse for me, as I read everything by him I could get my hands on.
I don’t have kids, nor do I plan on it, but as a former bookworm child I can say that adults’ attempts to control what I read were unwelcome, unhelpful, and unnecessary. Discussing challenging material with kids IS helpful and necessary (although probably quite often unwelcome).
TW: childhood sexual abuse; PTSD & symptoms
As a survivor of child sexual abuse at the hands of another child, I must vehemently disagree. Children cannot consent to sex with anyone. That includes other children.
There is no excuse for adults sanitizing CSA as “character development”. CSA does not build a child’s character. It destroys one from the core. Many of those of us who survived CSA feel like we don’t have a core self, that our developing personalities were murdered by our abusers before we had the chance to know who we were or who we wanted to be.
I found Stephen King’s It terribly triggering of my complex PTSD symptoms when I read it as a teen. I can easily imagine how reading this book as a child would have caused me flashbacks, dissociation and panic attacks, decades before I had any way of understanding what was happening to me. I didn’t have my PTSD diagnosed until I was 30, so I have much experience with the terror and confusion one feels when one is experiencing PTSD symptoms and/or being retraumatized without knowing one has PTSD at all. It is utterly terrifying. I feel very deeply for any CSA survivor who had the misfortune to read this book as a child.
For someone like me, this book would have been just as disturbing and triggering as the one that included incest (since the CSA I survived was also incestuous). It disturbs me very much that those books were in the children’s section at all. I hope librarians today do a better job of vetting what is shelved there.
@14 Myself and other trans sff fans I know sometimes chat about whether we think Heinlein might come out as trans if he were alive today. It’s an interesting question; opinions vary.
I can guarantee that none of the nuns managing my grade school library read the books they put on those shelves. There is no way any of Marian Zimmer Bradley‘s Darkover books were appropriate for grade school, but that did not stop me from reading World Wreckers in fifth grade. Of course I was several years older before I understood what I read! I never did tell them that the entire series was filled with homosexuality, bestiality (or at least interspecies relations), hermaphrodites, and just about anything else one could think of. I credit it for my open-minded views on relationships.
I was reading by a very young age. In 2nd grade, I was lucky enough that tmy teacher recognized that I was reading & comprehending what I was reading at a much higher level than the typical 2nd-grader. (like @58, when I was able to explain concepts & define words she thought were above me, she got it). So she mandated to the librarians that I was not to be age-limited in the school library. Which rule continued through the remaining years I was there. She also worked with my parents, who were both readers but not sure how to deal with my age vs book selection. So my parents let me go wherever I wanted in the public library, though there were certain rules like no Stephen King, John Saul, or comparable horror novels. I think they were mostly concerned about horror giving me nightmares, but they never did, since of course I found ways to read them anyway. I don’t remember not getting the sex stuff, I did in a conceptual “this is what adults do to make babies” way, if not getting all the nuances. Which, in hindsight, it would’ve appalled my parents that I grasped that much. The first time I read Dune, the political machinations gave me a huge headache & I knew there were aspects I was missing. So once I finished, I told my parents I liked it but there were things I hadn’t understood, went to bed, then started it over the next day & deliberately read slower than usual, & spent time puzzling through some of the political concepts until it made sense.
I know some books were characterized as YA back then, but what I generally don’t like about today’s YA classification is that the writing seems too simple. YA back then, limited to no sex, no real bad language, etc. But plots & concepts were not necessarily watered down. Now the plots and concepts seem so simple in modern YA, and even word choices seem too simple. Or maybe it’s just the difference age brings…
The political machinations in ‘Dune’ still give me headaches. I love the books and reread them regularly but after maybe thirty years I still don’t claim to fully understand them!
@8 I hope you’ve checked out Cellar Stories, 111 Mathewson Street in Providence. It’s upstairs – the move was a hoot – an seemingly endless chain of customers each carrying a box a couple blocks from the old basement location to the new 2nd floor.
Honestly, once a kid has understanding of the differences between fantasy and sf, and reality, there’s no real reason to keep them reading the kiddie section. I was 7 when my mom signed the permission slip for me to read from the adult section…I’d run out of stuff in the childrens, and even young adult section, being an absolutely voracious reader. She checked that I had a good understanding of reality vs fiction, and let me loose with only the instructions to come to her about things I didn’t understand.
That said, finding, and reading copies of Jean M. Auel’s Earth’s Children series (first three or four books, I think.) in the middle school library was a bit of a shock!…Not that it stopped me from reading them…they were VERY well researched historical fantasies, and it made the paleontology nerd in me happy.
In grade school I was able to order the H.P. Lovecraft collection “The Shadow over Innsmouth and other tales of horror” from Scholastic Books.
Contained within were Lovecraft’s only pure SF story “In the Walls of Eryx” (How has this not ever been made into a movie?! Turn the same crew who did “Moon” loose on it.) and his perhaps classifiable as SF “The Colour out of Space”.
In Jr. High I managed to read every SF&F book the school library had, in two 180 day school years. I also read a lot of the biographies and put a pretty good dent in the reference section. I also checked out books from the city library and read the Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, American Rifleman, and Guns and Ammo, treasure hunting and metal detecting and other magazines my grandfather subscribed to – including back issues he had into the 1960’s.
The school had all the Pern books and plenty of others with subject matter some folks might not consider appropriate for 12 to 15 year old kids. They didn’t have Heinlein’s later stuff, because it hadn’t been written and published yet. I was a bit put out upon hearing of his death in 1988 because he was one author I really wanted to meet someday.
I’m still a voracious reader. Since getting a Handspring Visor Platinum in 2004 most of my fiction reading has been ebooks. It’s wonderful to be able to carry a library of over 900 books (and ever increasing) in my smartphone.
I was a natural early reader too, and automatically shifted my reading material up through the levels all by myself. I don’t think I skipped much, although YA wasn’t so much of a separate thing as such – the shelves at my small library were labeled children’s, juvenile, general adult, science fiction and fantasy, mystery, horror, biography, romance, etc. (Now my current library lumps all adult fiction together except for mystery. I have no idea why. Child-me would have been annoyed at not being able to browse all the SF/F in one place, but might have had broader tastes earlier.) Once I got past juvenile, I mostly read SF/F. I don’t remember how old I was (nine?), but the first non-juvenile fantasy I picked up was Elfstones of Shannara. I was certainly reading Wheel of Time and Sword of Truth by ten (child torture and genocide, anyone?). I didn’t get into hard SF quite as early, but fantasy was my bridge. Things like McCaffrey’s Rowan or Ship Who Sang after I’d read Pern, which itself was a bridge, especially Dragonsdawn and then the later books with AIVAS, the rediscovered computer. Or Anthony’s Apprentice Adept.
The librarians never gated me on content as far as I can remember. Early on they tried to severely limit my quantity, but once they quizzed me and understood that I was comprehending what I was reading and yes, in fact, I read every one of the four books I checked out two days ago and now I need more, I didn’t have any more trouble. I don’t remember my mom limiting me on reading material either (except for taking all the books away as a consequence for bad behavior once in a while!), although she did ask me to broaden my content beyond just SF/F. So for a while, every time I went to the library, I had to check out and read a couple of regular novels, mysteries, biographies, anything else beyond my stack of genre. Still, I’m certain she wouldn’t have wanted me to read Xanth if she’d known what it was like. It’s rather trashy and formulaic, really; Incarnations of Immortality and Apprentice Adept have much better plots and characters. I really liked the problem-solving and magic systems and mostly ignored the sexual content…it’s probably just as well that I never read his Firefly, I’m guessing.
The one time I kind of got into trouble was when I started using scenes from Sword of Truth to inspire my vocabulary sentences in spelling class. I’d set myself a challenge to write a little story or coherent scene description out of all the sequential sentences in a particular assignment, which usually covered 8-10 specific words. Note that this is much harder than simply writing one sentence per word, so generally the teacher was impressed when I managed to do it. But then one time the scene I used was the one where the evil wizard is kindly torturing a child (yeah, he’s a bastard). Oops. I don’t think I got into serious trouble, but I did have to promise that I wouldn’t write about that kind of thing anymore.
Now my four-year-old wants to check out half a dozen chapter books at a time even though at the pace I read to him, it takes two or three days to finish one. Can’t wait to see what his stacks look like in about three or four years! :)
I’m older (57) so definitely experienced this at our local library when I was 7 years and up – all science fiction was in the kids section. Including the ‘racier’ Heinlein’s mentioned above, Blish, et al.
To be fair it meant I was reading at an adult level by age 8. The teachers couldn’t believe my reading age from the standardised tests.
I was fortunate enough that my father went through this at a young age (in the 50’s) and decided that it was a good idea to make sure I got a similarly broad upbringing. I can’t have been more than 10 when I found my dad’s H. P. Lovecraft compendium… I’d sneak into my parents room and steal books from my dad’s shelf, making sure to put them back exactly as they had been before they could notice the missing manuscript. My teachers were always astounded with my reading age.
When I was 8, my favorite book was The Andromeda Strain. My father loved books, and if we could read it, we could read it.
@80:
I don’t think this is a fair generic criticism. The Hunger Games are a fair counterexample. Also, Harry Potter is downright subversive.
I, too, read Farnham’s Freehold as a “How do you like it when the shoe’s on the other foot?” indictment of racism. But I grew up in Virginia when Jim Crow, while theoretically dead, was still shambling along. But FF certainly didn’t age well, and I don’t think anyone who didn’t grow up around that kind of racism interpreted it the same way. It also wasn’t particularly well-written. IIRC, Jo Walton has the “No Heinlein over an inch thick” rule, and this one is about that thick.
When I was in maybe first grade, I found a book in the school library that was a roleplaying book where you skipped to different pages depending on your decisions. There was a tower with four doors and a cure for an illness inside, and you were trying to find it without dying… horribly.
I vividly remember being dropped onto a conveyor belt at a canning plant and dropping a giant pearl into the can labelled “Canned Elf” so i could escape. I wish i knew what the name of it was because it was my first introduction to fantasy, but it… probably shouldn’t have been available to a first grader….
Best From Fantasy & Science Fiction 16; ed. Edward L. Ferman – not a personal experience (that I recall) but described at https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/115791991
“The Seven Wonders of the Universe” is by Mose Mallette – whose genre bibliography in http://www.isfdb.org is this and one other short story (later 1960s) in “F&SF” and one in anthology “Anubis #4” (not a sex thing, an ancient Egyptian god, possibly a sex thing as well) – is noted as unusual, and apparently the Wonders include:
The Copulation Pits of Venus (Western Section)
The Copulation Pits of Venus (Central Section)
The Copulation Pits of Venus (Eastern Section)
And now you’re wondering as well.
For clarification I checked the dictionary for “rolled” in case it’s specifically a sex thing. It seems not: “Slang. to rob, especially by going through the pockets of a victim who is either asleep or drunk.” Of course I see how that -can- be a sex thing. Actually, “to rob” typically involves violence or the threat of it to obtain property. But neither of these is a term of art.
I think that as a child I first encountered the word “roll” in the sense of a mugging, in a “B.C.” cartoon in which the talking turtle explained reasons for his longevity, the punchline being that also “I never got rolled!” Or perhaps that joke was more shocking than I noticed. Or, for a turtle, it means to be physically tipped over.
Then I think that Corwin in Roger Zelazny’s Amber books had the sex version, or something like it, in the back-story that he originally couldn’t remember.
If only Heinlein had had someone he’d listen to who could give him the same sort of advice he gave Niven and Pournelle.
Our fourth grade teacher read us Watership Down aloud, for an hour every afternoon. To the best of my knowledge we were all enthralled by it and nobody went home complaining to their parents.
I read the Dune series in 7th grade. The fourth book had me looking up “orgasm” in the dictionary. The fifth one had me seriously blushing and I put the series on pause at that point. Then I was casting around for something else and thought, hmm, this Dhalgren book looks interesting, lets try that instead …
That’s good to hear! I spent pretty much every Saturday of my teenage years there, either gaming in the basement (when they still had the giant round table down there) or reading the week’s new comics. And of course looking for new SF & F.
Mine was The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, by Philip K. Dick, in the Children’s Library at Belfast Central Library, when I was twelve. Which boggles me still.
I read my brother’s copy of Stranger in a Strange Land when I was eight years of age and had no idea what sexual desire and recreational sex were. I read it once more in that state, and then I read it a few years later when I understood (at least intellectually) those concepts, and it was an extremely different book. I’m amused by a slight resonance this has with an incident described in the novel, one supposedly of much more import to the Martians than contact with Earth people, in which a living Martian a few thousand years back had started a work and died midway without noticing, finishing it as an (in human terms) ghost.
As I was around ten when New Wave works and some other more sexually explicit science fiction works started to appear in book form as well—think Silverberg’s The World Inside—I had the experience of being derided by other boys for so unmanly an act as reading while receiving more instruction (and mis-) in the how strange and varied sex was than they were getting from their assigned reading in school, and (for all the mis-) probably a better picture than they were getting in the schoolyard….
On the other hand, I eagerly awaited what turned out to be I Will Fear No Evil, and found the sex vaguely interesting byut the female voices seemed false, and I strongly doubted that 20[01][0-9] would resemble 1970 that strongly….
My rural high school library had a surprising amount of SF that I assume the school board wasn’t aware of. “The Man Who Folded Himself” for example…