Dystopian Fiction for Young People: Instructive Tales of Resilience

ABSTRACT

The rise and popularity of dystopian fiction in recent years is quite marked, and critics often attribute such high sales of books and box office as being linked to the impact September 11 has had on the world, especially in the United States. Although the events of September 11, 2001 saw a heightened anxiety by nations and their citizens about the fear and threat of terrorism—an anxiety that is paradoxically lowered and raised by increased surveillance practices, security checks, and warnings—other changes since the last stages of the twentieth century have also raised concerns and anxieties. The processes of globalization, immigration, and advances in technology have brought about many social and economic changes, and advances in nanobiology are redefining the very essence of life. The extrapolation of the world people currently know into the very worst of future scenarios is the subject of dystopian fiction. Dystopian narratives are diverse in their treatment of future scenarios, with some presenting a pessimistic outlook and others offering “a horizon of hope” (Moylan, 2000, p. 147).

Notes

¹ The French theorist, Michel Foucault (1975), drew on Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon to theorize surveillance in disciplinary societies. Bentham’s 18^th century panopticon was a prison-style building that enabled a guard to observe all cells at once. Due to the influential work of Foucault, the word is now widely used in relation to the ever-vigilant gaze of CCTV and other visual tracking devices.

² According to Scholastic more than 50 million books in print and digital format have been sold in the US alone. The Hunger Games (the first book in the series) was on the New York Times bestseller list for more than two hundred consecutive weeks/more than three years. Following the release of The Hunger Games movie further new readers are discovering the series (Scholastic, 2012).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kerry Mallan

Kerry Mallan, Ph.D., is Professor in the Faculty of Education, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia.