Varley’s Red Lightning and Red Thunder and Spider Robinson’s The Free Lunch are about the only recent ones I can think of within the SF field. These are good, but just not enough! Heinlein wrote at least one/year (in addition to his adult works), Norton often put out three or four in a year, and the young reader knew that these authors put out something for them on a regular basis. Perhaps the YA market just doesn’t seem lucrative enough for today’s authors to devote themselves to it?

Where are the “Mad Scientist Club”’s, the Heinlein YA series, the Andre Norton’s of today?

However, even when HP gets his light-sabre, it still won’t fix the basic headache. Cutting edge scientific theory has moved well beyond the range of things the average person can understand. A rocket to the moon? Outrageously impossible in 1870, but the concept was very comprehensible, another new frontier that was just a little harder to get to, and didn’t require you to actually be a rocket scientist to understand. What’s comparable to this today? Dark energy, black holes, the ‘Singularity’, quantum mechanics as it applies to the macro world, nano-bots, AI’s running the world’s economy, etc, etc. It’s difficult to use these things in a novel without providing some explanation of what they are and how they work, as most people have neither heard of nor thought about these possibilities, nor can most relate such things to their everyday lives of today. People don’t dream about what it would be like to become an uploaded computer consciousness, certainly not the way a great many people dreamed about going to outer space.

There’s something in the current cultural climate that does not engage with the exciting possibilities that are embedded in the science journals everyday.

Need something like a Harry Potter in space to get youngsters excited about the subject again…

Regards