December 1, 2013

Slice of PIE: Bathrooms in Space and Teen/YA Fiction

I’m sure Star Trek Fans noticed that the first time we ever SAW a bathroom on the Enterprise that was actually used was in the movie, INSURRECTION in which Picard was washing his face after a particularly disturbing nightmare. The website Memory Alpha doesn’t really do anything to dispute this except to mention times and places that we have “caught a glimpse of” a bathroom – oh, and it tells us what the Ferengi call their bathrooms...

I suppose the reason for this is that bathrooms are so nasty we all ignore the fact that we even HAVE bathrooms.

Oh wait, that’s not true either.

After a week of watching dozens of HGTV show episodes, I can say with a certain amount of authority that bathrooms are mentioned an uncountable number of times! Point of fact: “Aside from the kitchen, which most homebuyers consider to be the most important room in the house, the bathrooms are considered a key selling point…‘Our second-favorite room is the bath,’ said Joan McCloskey, a former Better Homes and Gardens Magazine editor who talked about new-home buyer trends at this year's International Builder Show.” (http://www.realtor.com/home-finance/real-estate/sellers/bathroom-shine-home-selling.aspx?source=web)

So we don’t mention bathrooms in science fiction – and I’m going to focus specifically on children’s/middle grade/teen/YA science fiction in particular – because...why?

Let’s see if this observation of mine is really true. The Golden Duck Award is given annually to science fiction written for young people – you can find the website here: http://www.goldenduck.org/winner.php. Of those that I read, I cannot remember a single reference to anyone going to the bathroom!

Maybe this is where we lost our young adults, middle graders, and children. Maybe the simple realism of bathrooms in their lives NOT being represented in science fiction has driven them away?

How important is the bathroom to people under 25? From birth through two or three or four, adults hover over children, awaiting the golden day when they “use the potty chair”. Parents dream of days without diapers. After that, the struggle ensues to get the elementary children to USE the shower or bathtub to wash off the grime of hard days of playing. Finally…well, let me ask this: How many of you have ever anxiously awaited the exit of a teenager from the bathroom? How many of you have stood in a high school restroom for even a few moments (and this goes for both boys and girls rooms!) while an endless line of teens primped in front of a mirror?

How can anyone think that the bathroom is less important to under 25s than it is to their home-buying elders?

I became aware of this because of a convention I recently attended. The Guest of Honor was hard science fiction writer Jack McDevitt and in one of the sessions mentioned that few writers even mention bathrooms despite the fact that one of the first questions children ask astronauts is “How do you go to bathroom in space?” This is so common that in May of 2011, TIME online ran the following story: http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/05/05/everyone-poops-how-do-astronauts-go-to-the-bathroom-in-space/

The upshot of this is that EVERYONE who writes for children/middle graders/teens/YA MUST include at the very least a sentence in which “They Went Into The Bathroom And Came Out A Bit Later”.

If they don’t, I won’t vote for them in the Andre Norton Award any more.

So there.

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