Presenting the Case for Social Change: The Creative Dilemma of Dystopian Writing for Children

Abstract

Since the late 1960s the futuristic fiction written for young readers has been disposed to make serious and disturbing comment on the likely direction of human civilization. During the 1970s and to the present day, a dark literature of emergency and despair has developed, expressing deep-rooted fears for the future of those children being addressed. As this dystopian genre has developed, its nightmarish imaginative landscapes have become increasingly intolerable, presenting a variety of repressive and tyrannically controlled states, whether writers conceive these as being neoprimitive or hypertechnological in essence. In the 1980s devastatingly bleak visions of the horrifying aftermath of nuclear war emerged, adding new levels of pessimism and concern about the future. Writers’ hypotheses about humankind’s likely lines of development have proved far from optimistic, and this large genre in children’s publishing has become characterized by extreme, arguably unprecedented, levels of anxiety and hopelessness.