From: Stacy Whitman <stacer11>
Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 00:10:19 -0400

I've been thinking about this a lot as well. I've been working on a project for my SF/F class at Simmons College, and for it I've been reading A LOT of science fiction and fantasy books, heavy on the science fiction for this particular project. So like Luc, forgive me for being heavy on the SF/F, but they're all YA, too.

The post-apocalyptic books (from what I'd like to call my "random" sampling, consisting of about 50 books lying on my floor) tends to start in the mid?s. What I'm thinking: it's about the time of the Star Wars program and a few years after all the lateps Cold War nuke talk, so people had in their minds that nuclear war was a very real possibility. Sting was singing about it in songs, we were talking about it in school and on the news and in the movies.. Not sure why it came up then and not after the Bay of Pigs in the 60s, but maybe the 70s made us less of an optimistic people--gas crisis, economic problems, etc etc. And then there was all that activism in the late 80s regarding the environment. I remember in 1990 how they announced in our school that the 90s would be the "decade of the environment." And there is a trend in the SF books I've been reading of a greater concern for the environment, dystopic views of what might happen if we continue on at the rate we're going, etc.
(including the environmental costs of war).

One book I just finished reading is Gregory Maguire's I Feel Like the Morning Star, which came out in 1989, right before the wall came down. It's a post-atom bomb world, in which survivors have been living in this weird steel bunker called the Pioneer or something. The extrapolation is right out of the 80s book, that eventually we'd all bomb each other and the world would die, just like in Mad Max or something.

The SF books that I've found from the 60s don't really postulate a post-apocalyptic world; their view is more of a Star Trek utopic view, that technology will set us free. I'm looking at The Weathermakers by Ben Bova right now, and it seems to be a simple extrapolation about weather control through increased technology. Starship Troopers by Heinlein is a little more dystopic, but with that manifest?stiny feel of it being right that America takes over the universe. Ender's Game and its sequels straddle the fence, probably a function of Orson Scott Card's changing ideas over the course of the years he wrote them.

A Wrinkle in Time is an interesting one. It's much more hopeful than many books I've read from more recent years. If you compare books like that with Shade's Children by Garth Nix (post-apocalyptic world due to technology, I think-?en a while since I read it), House of the Scorpion (cloning), Turnabout by Margaret Peterson Haddix (a look at what would happen if you were able to un-age when you hit death, with the help of medical technology), Among the Hidden and its sequels by Margaret Peterson Haddix (what would happen if we had population control laws), and The Giver--there is hope to be found in these books (certainly more than I find in Feed), but it seems that the earlier books had a more optimistic faith in humankind's ability to overcome differences, and that technology would assist us rather than be our downfall. Technology seems to be the bad guy, overall, in the more recent books.

There are some anomalies to my theory--books like Andrew Clements's Things Not Seen, which is about a boy who wakes up invisible one morning. No earth-shattering events, just a boy and his family trying to figure out an individual event.

But it seems to me that the more technology we get, the more we wonder if it's not such a great thing. These are deep topics that all the above authors have handled well. I don't know if I'd count any of them as "edgy" or not-?ed, for sure. But I guess my point is that it's possible to handle a topic considered dark and to handle it well, but I also agree with others on this forum who've said that we've had a lot of bleak books lately.

Maybe it's a function of being in a turn of the decade/turn of the millennium. In my art history class a few years ago as an undergrad we studied art at the turn of the last millennium, 1000 A.D. Right before the turn, art got really dark and really weird. I can't remember enough to explain it well. There's a painting of the Crucifixion that has always stuck in my mind from that period, in which the colors are these weird hot pinks and bright greens and blues, while a storm is raging in the background--which was a great departure from previous works, if I remember right. The turning of an era like that puts people in mind of the end of the world--maybe we've unconsciously had that kind of a "bleak" artistic period, too. Think of all the Y2K scares, etc. Plus, we've had some *very* real things happening lately that make the Y2K scare quite pale in comparison.

These are just some random thoughts I've had in the last few years, and I'm not sure if any of them are right, and I definitely don't have a lot to back up what I say, so go ahead and take it with a large crystal of salt.

Stacy Whitman Student, Center for the Study of Children's Literature Simmons College Boston, MA
Received on Thu 22 May 2003 11:10:19 PM CDT