ABSTRACT
During the 1990s and well into the twenty-fi rst century, we have witnessed a fl ourishing of dystopian trends in children’s and juvenile literature all over the world. Yet dystopia is, or should be, by defi nition an impossible genre in children’s fi ction. As many critics have repeatedly pointed out, children’s literature is utopian by nature. As a consequence, children’s fi ction maintains a myth of a happy and innocent childhood, apparently based on adult writers’ nostalgic memories and bitter insights about the impossibility of returning to the childhood idyll. With a prominent new trend in children’s fi ction showing tangible traits of dystopia, children’s literature seems to have come to its antithesis. As critics and mediators of children’s literature, we are still trying to view it as optimistic, with a strong faith in the future. But we hardly fi nd any of these features in contemporary children’s novels set in the near or distant future. Instead, we fi nd ruthless depictions of the destruction of humankind and the end of the Earth, of moral decay and increasing societal divergence.
