ABSTRACT

The relationship between child and nature has a long and complex history to which children’s literature has contributed through a diverse range of texts, from the sense of freedom that nature offers children in adventure stories such as Richard Jefferies’ Bevis, The Story of a Boy (1882) and Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons (1930), to its dark, metaphoric function in Alan Garner’s The Owl Service (1967) and David Almond’s Kit’s Wilderness (1999). Young SF as a genre engaging primarily with technology and its impact on society might be expected to renegotiate the conditions of this child-nature relationship, which plays a signifi cant role in many of the texts explored in this chapter, and it is the extent of this renegotiation that is central to discussion here; a discussion that reveals the enduring, if not retrogressive, infl uence of some of the earliest theories of childhood.