My 13-year-old daughter seems to be reading nothing but stories set in horrible future worlds. In them, the land and the buildings are destroyed, laws are broken, rulers are corrupt and adults have either disappeared or been reduced to unreliable protectors. Wouldn't it be better to show children how to look after the world they live in rather than to tell them that what exists is not worth saving?
Following the success of Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games but also many other dark novels set in uncomfortable futures, including Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking trilogy and Charlie Higson's The Enemy and its sequels, it is easy to think that the question "What if the world as we know it ended?" is the only question posed in books for 12+.
While that's not the case, its popularity is understandable given that it reflects widespread anxiety about how badly the natural resources in the planet are being looked after. It is hard to convey the importance of nurture without showing the effects of its lack. Presenting landscapes without growth, and buildings reduced to rubble is a powerful way of helping children to imagine the way things might end if advice about saving what we know and have is not heeded.
Having provided vivid examples of what such a place might look like, these dystopian future novels do as you suggest; they offer young readers the chance to think about what kind of world they would create for themselves if they could forge everything again. There are things they would save and other things that they would lose. Taken together, that gives young readers a way of thinking about what most needs preserving. Breaking and making is at the heart of a great many stories; the devastation of the old highlights the importance of the new when it is rediscovered or reinvented.
In addition, stories such as these empower children by trusting them with roles far beyond reality. Typically, the destruction wipes out "good" adult rulers; children step into the breach. It's not a new fictional phenomenon. Earlier examples include Robert Swindells Brother in Land, a classic title of the 1980s reflecting then current concerns about the possibility of a nuclear bomb being dropped, in which a group of children have to manage on their own after the adults have been destroyed and Marcus Sedgwick's Floodland, published at the turn of the millennium, in which, having seen her parents sail away to safety, a young girl has to navigate Eel Island and its inhabitants if she is to survive when the east of England is subsumed by flood water. In both, and in the many dystopian novels of today, an apparently bleak world is re-imagined and lit up by children who understand clearly what is worth saving as they step from childhood to adulthood. Frequently, family is let go while friendship or trust in others becomes the future foundation. Navigating that space is what all adolescents need to do which is why they like this kind of fiction so much.
