ABSTRACT
Dystopian fiction for young adults celebrates the potential for personal and species advancement without sugarcoating the very real dangers we and our progeny face in the postmodern and posthuman environment. YA dystopias are fictive versions of the contemporary world that promote reflection and critique. Their enormous and growing popularity suggests that we live at a pivotal moment in human history just as the members of the intended youth audience are experiencing pivotal moments in their own development. The phrase “brave new” in the title of this collection is an intertextual invocation of Shakespeare and Aldous Huxley, those literary bookends between whom the modern world rises and falls. Eighty years after Brave New World (1931), we live and raise our children in what Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer have dubbed the Anthropocene, 1 the geo-historical moment of uncertain duration in which humans wave with abandon a wand more awesome than any stick Prospero or even Huxley could have fashioned. Like Prospero, we want something better for our children; like John the Savage, we fear it doesn't exist. I have called the YA dystopias under discussion parables not because they are short, straightforward didactic analogies—far from it. They are, however, imaginative and encouraging extrapolations that offer ethical pathways to better futures than current behavioral paradigms are likely to produce. All of these pathways require that we stop expecting 190different results from the same behaviors and adopt what I am calling a posthuman perspective.
