Very true, all of this. "Here's the marketing definition of YA..." The cons where the panelists don't know what YA is sound painful.
I was looking for good current YA SF recently, and found not very much. Lots and lots of vaguely dystopic things, but not much SF. (Dystopia is good, but its own animal, neither fantasy nor science fiction, in my mind.) Though that still is not an excuse to invoke Heinlein, I agree.
The problem with teens being on panels is that often teens are not at those cons and therefore in those rooms to start with. I do not mind being the Token Teen very much, but it's still annoying. (And I'm not sure if the answer is Get More Teens to Cons, or what.)
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I was looking for good current YA SF recently, and found not very much. Lots and lots of vaguely dystopic things, but not much SF. (Dystopia is good, but its own animal, neither fantasy nor science fiction, in my mind.) Though that still is not an excuse to invoke Heinlein, I agree.
The problem with teens being on panels is that often teens are not at those cons and therefore in those rooms to start with. I do not mind being the Token Teen very much, but it's still annoying. (And I'm not sure if the answer is Get More Teens to Cons, or what.)