The coming-of-age story, the dramatic passage from adolescence to adulthood, is one of the thematic cornerstones of all literature. It is found in classics like David Copperfield and Emma, and it is prevalent in such popular fiction as J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, and, of course, the entire Harry Potter series. Science fiction and fantasy authors are particularly evil, though, because they can heap excruciating new complications upon the trauma and angst of adolescence.

Science fiction has always been filled with stories about young people growing up while facing adversity. The Post-War years were rich ones for these tales. One of my favorites from the fifties is Robert Heinlein’s The Star Beast, which chronicles the maturation of the beast as well as the humans around him. Rather than focus on a child, Arthur C. Clarke brings all of humanity to adulthood in his classic 1953 novel about Childhood’s End.

The sixties, a period of self-discovery, was also a fertile era for these tales. The most famous example from that decade must be Frank Herbert’s Dune. Alexei Panshin’s appropriately named Rite of Passage was published around the same time, and one of my favorites, John Wyndham’s Chocky, about a boy coping with an alien telepath, came out in 1968. Harlan Ellison’s tale of a young man learning how to survive in a brutal future, “A Boy and His Dog,” received the Nebula award for best novella in 1969.

Asimov’s has run its share of these stories. One of our longest was a three-part serial by Robert Silverberg, The Longest Way Home (October/November 2001, December 2001, and January 2002). In this novel, the journey from boyhood to man is literal as well as metaphoric, since fifteen-year-old Joseph, heir to House Keilloran (one of the ruling human families on a distant planet), must survive an arduous trip across an unfriendly continent to reach the safety of his homeland. A well-received coming of age novella from Asimov’s was John Kessel’s 2002 tale, “Stories for Men,” about a teenage boy growing up on the Moon.

These examples may give the impression that these types of tales are all sagas about the rites of passage of young men, or that the complexities of the issues that arise from the journey from adolescence to adulthood are too rich and layered to be covered in under ten thousand words. But there have been a number of short stories, many of which capture the experience of girls and young women. Suzy McKee Charnas’s 1989 Nebula-award-winning story “Boobs,” about a teenage girl’s steps toward adulthood, is not only a great story about a young woman, it is also one of the best werewolf stories I’ve ever read. Another short, sharp coming-of-age tale is Connie Willis’s, “A Letter from the Cleary’s.” Like “A Boy and His Dog,” this 1982 Nebula winner is also a vicious tale of survival in a post-holocaust America.

There are many stories from Asimov’s that show how universal the rite-of-passage experience is. In “Breathmoss,” Ian R. MacLeod’s 2002 Asimov’s Readers’ Award winning novella, the only immediate journey is one of self-discovery for Jalila, a human girl on the planet Habara. An unorthodox child in a rigid culture, she must come to terms with who she is and the role that she has chosen and must choose in a future of time dilation and space travel. (And my twelve-year-old thinks her choices are tough!) Despite a suffocating social order, Jalila finds room for growth and self-enlightenment. Eleanor Arnason does a masterful job of showing an alien coming to terms with herself and her world in the 1999 novella “Dapple.” Allen M. Steele’s long series of Coyote stories chronicles the coming of age of both a boy and his planet. Robert Reed does the same for a boy and the human species in his Sister Alice stories. One of the beauties of science fiction is that it is able to take the themes that are the cornerstones of human literature and extrapolate beyond the human condition.

Several months ago, we received the powerful novellas from Paul Melko and William Shunn that can be found in this issue. While these two stories were very different in tone, characters, and setting, they both share the young-man-coming-of-age literary theme. A couple of months later, a wonderful big novella from William Barton showed up. Again, it has nothing in common with the first two tales except the coming-of-age theme. Of the many factors that go into pulling an issue together, the most important one is the stories that are submitted to the magazine. The double issue also provides me with the best opportunity to run novellas. Thus, mostly accidentally, a loose theme for April/May was born. It’s a theme, though, that is not necessarily reflected in the other stories in the issue. To paraphrase Polonius, since there are more things in Heaven and Earth and science fiction than are dreamed of in this editorial, and since I also wanted to squeeze in a wide range of short stories and novelettes, you will have to wait until the October/November issue to discover how young men come of age in Mr. Barton’s tale.