It goes without saying that I’m not exactly the target audience for Charlie Jane Anders’s new YA trilogy, which begins with
Victories Greater Than Death. But, as I’ve argued before, there’s a huge overlap between YA and SF readers. A good deal of classic SF works perfectly well as YA, and some tropes are essentially the same in both genres: geek valorization, children with secret powers, nonconformist outsiders and conformist bullies, clueless teachers and dim authority figures. All a successful YA novel really needs to do, then, is turn its adult readers willingly into YA readers, and with SF readers that’s not a very tall order: it’s simply a matter of tweaking the protocols. In the case of