ABSTRACT
In his study of Western culture’s construction of childhood and its representations in children’s texts from Grimm to Disney, Joseph Zornado declares:
The vast majority of children’s stories invite the child to identify with the adult’s idea of what a child should be, leaving unquestioned the authority structure of adult and child always implied in the text and by the adult’s reading the story to the child. Children’s stories, in other words, are more often than not adult propaganda that serves to confi rm for the child the hierarchical relationship between the adult and the child. (Zornado, 2001: xv)
SF novels frequently engage with extrapolating possible futures from current social trends. Authors often explore power relations within present day society, for instance between genders, races, or governing bodies and their subjects, by imagining a futuristic or alternative reality in which these relations have shifted and changed.1 It is therefore not surprising that the power dynamic between adults and children, highlighted in Zornado’s statement, has been the focus of a number of SF novels written for the adult market as well as for children.2
