Lay me down and let the moon have her way with me
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yhlee is talking about Pern and I couldn't remember if I had ever posted a picture of the fire lizard I sewed and stuffed and armatured with wire from an unraveled coat hanger in ninth grade, following a pattern from an older friend who used to walk around the school with his own fire lizard on his shoulder. Her name is Sheyne Meydl.
The official remit of the FSU Museum of Fine Arts' "It's a Lot Like Falling in Love: Lesbian Publishing in the '70s, '80s, '90s, and Beyond" was what it said in the subtitle, but what
selkie and I actually got while virtually attending a roundtable with Stephanie Andrea Allen, Katherine V. Forrest, Joan Nestle, Cheryl Clarke, and Barbara Smith was more like an impassioned manifesto on behalf of small-press publishing, grassroots collectives, and radically inclusive archives, plus a masterclass in flirting on beyond seventy. It was great. Quotes of the night: "If we had a Mount Rushmore of Lesbians, you three would be on it." "An identity is not a politic." "We change the world. And then the archives remember. And we must have our remembrance in our own hands."
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Legit! I was willing to believe that people had started with the second of the trilogy for the reasons detailed above.
However, since 'Young Adult' fiction didn't exist in the 1970s, Menolly is effectively a child adventure protagonist in the tradition of writers like Rosemary Sutcliff or Peter Dickinson -- a completely different kettle of fish from the self-conscious adolescents of the YA genre
My knowledge of the field is not exhaustive, but I think of the '70's as being the decade when young adult literature crystallized as such, although I would be willing to believe it was even happening in the '60's. Certainly I have seen the term used critically as well as commercially in context of the decade. It was in contemporary use as far back as the '50's.
I'm afraid Anne McCaffrey, for me, is one of those writers who went on despite increasingly diminishing returns
I'm familiar with the phenomenon—I think of it as one of the two major failure modes of a long-running series, the other being never finishing the damn thing at all. Even at the time of publication, however, All the Weyrs of Pern was so obviously the natural (and apparently planned: "And a time for every purpose . . .") place to leave the series, I couldn't see the worth of going on. And then there were dolphins.
I'm glad to hear that Restoree holds up. Revisiting after a distance is always a risk.
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In retrospective critique I can believe it -- anecdotally, I don't remember ever encountering the concept at all until you started hitting the 'Twilight'/'Hunger Games'/'Maze Runner' phenomenon. There were school stories, and there were unsettling and sometimes scary children's novels like "Elidor", "Skellig" or "The Dark is Rising", but since it was generally held that the mark of a good children's book is that it can be read and appreciated (on a different level) by adults, I don't remember any stigma over teenagers reading 'children's books' as opposed to having a segregated market targeted specifically at them. But then I was reading adult books alongside children's books from a very young age -- one of my early memories is of reading Masefield's "The Bird of Dawning" while lying on my stomach in a tent pitched on our back lawn, and identifying so profoundly with the protagonist that remembering the episode I assumed with hindsight he must have been a cabin-boy or something similar; in fact the Internet informs me that he was a second mate in his twenties! I also remember finding Sheila Hocken's guide-dog memoir "Emma and I" on the paperback spinner in the children's library, which in retrospect seems an odd place for it to have been categorised ;-)
I don't remember whether the dolphins existed in the earlier seahold books; I only remember them really cropping up in "Dragonsdawn" (which I loved). So having established them in that novel, she may have felt the need to explain what happened to them in the 'present day'.
(Or, if you want to take the cynical view, her publishers didn't want to lose a profitable income stream and pressured her to keep up the output...)
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There were young adult sections in the libraries I grew up in and the phrase could be found in the jacket copy of books older than myself. I don't associate them with any stigma over children's books. Most reading children read whatever they can get their hands on at the earliest age they can work the language—I have to revise one of my earlier comments to you for that reason, because when the numbers are crunched I was reading Pern by third grade at least (I have a tendency to assume that events in my childhood happened later than they did). We can totally argue about the continuing fragmentation of middle grade and new adult and other divisions I may not even be aware of, but I don't think of literature for children, adolescents, or adults as necessarily stratified by any particular genre or limit of complexity.