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The Inter-Galactic Playground: A Critical Study of Children's and Teen's Science Fiction. By Farah Mendlesohn. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009.
Reviewed by Michael Levy
I was pleased to be asked to review Farah Mendlesohn's new book. I'd very much liked her previous volume, the award-winning Rhetorics of Fantasy (2008), and said so in a review in Science Fiction Studies. Also, I knew that The Inter-Galactic Playground had at least part of its genesis in an essay by Mendlesohn that appeared in a special science fiction issue of the Lion and the Unicorn that I co- guest edited with Janice Bogstad in 2004. There aren't all that many people doing serious work on the confluence between adult and young adult science fiction and fantasy, and for a number of years Mendlesohn has been one of the colleagues with whom I've most enjoyed discussing this topic.
Reviewing The Inter-Galactic Playground, however, has turned out to be a slightly odd experience. I quickly discovered that yet another (admittedly related) genesis of the book, which Mendlesohn specifically mentions in her first chapter and returns to later in the volume, is an ongoing argument that she and I have had over exactly what constitutes "real" or "full" science fiction and the extent to which much of what is published as young adult science fiction fails to meet her definition of the same. Over the years I believe that I've been able to nudge her slightly toward my position, and I know that she's had a reciprocal effect on me as well. While Mendlesohn and I still have our differences, I believe that she has some very valuable points to make about young adult science fiction.
Although she is rarely abstract, Mendlesohn is a very Aristotelian critic. She likes to structure and categorize, and she did so brilliantly in Rhetorics of Fantasy, in which she created the definitive study of "the way in which the fantastic enters the text" ( Rhetorics 273) by surveying literally hundreds of works, many of them children's or young adult fantasy (including a particularly memorable examination of Neil Gaiman's The Wolves in the Walls). At the center of her argument in The Inter-Galactic Playground is her belief that "science fiction is less a genre than it is...