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revdorothyl: missmurchsion made this (HellBound)
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Apocalyptic "Kid-Lit" -- apparently, this is new?

posted by [personal profile] revdorothyl at 04:36pm on 18/07/2008 under
I was looking for something else a little while ago, and instead stumbled across this recent Newsweek article:

Unhappily Ever After

Remember when children's books frolicked through tales of ponies and princes? The latest kid-lit craze is stories about living through the apocalypse-now. . . .

Maybe it's just all those Andre Norton sci-fi novels I read as a kid (or the C.S. Lewis), but I didn't think kids' books about living through the apocalypse were all that rare . . . even before the Buffyverse gave "apocalypse" a new twist on its pop-culture meaning.

When I shared this article link with a friend, she pointed out that,

Clearly these folks are unfamiliar with kids' sci-fi or even some Wonderful World of Disney fare from the early 80s. And that Ark II live action Saturday morning show. And they must have missed the Tripods series that was made into a BBC thing and aired on PBS after Doctor Who (also initially created for children). . . .

I guess the author of this Newsweek article must have had a very sheltered and boring reading and viewing list as a child?
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There are 13 comments on this entry. (Reply.)
 

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posted by [identity profile] valarltd.livejournal.com at 11:53pm on 18/07/2008
Z for Zachariah
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posted by [identity profile] revdorothyl.livejournal.com at 05:00pm on 22/07/2008
I'm not familiar with that one! -- how recent or not-recent is it? Was it good?
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posted by [identity profile] valarltd.livejournal.com at 09:16pm on 22/07/2008
It's from 1975.
I read it in the early 80s.
The Wikipedia article is accurate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_for_Zachariah

I thought it was very good at 13 or so. I wonder how I'd do with it now.
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posted by [identity profile] revdorothyl.livejournal.com at 10:41pm on 22/07/2008
Wow! Not lightweight, by any means, but it sounds like a lot of what I read (and appreciated) when I was a kid, too.
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posted by [identity profile] missmurchison.livejournal.com at 12:14am on 19/07/2008
Even outside the science fiction realm, I remember books about kids coping with war, abuse, and poverty. Nancy Drew didn't deal with apocalypses, but she did investigate mysteries and sometimes found herself in danger, and she was an entry-level drug to the world of murder mysteries.

The books I remember that were most about ponies (well, horses) and princes were Narnia (world ends!) and the Arthurian cycle (Camelot go boom!).
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posted by [identity profile] revdorothyl.livejournal.com at 04:40pm on 22/07/2008
Love the point about Nancy Drew as the murder-mystery starter drug, and also about the apocalyptic aspects of most fairy tales and legends (end of the world as we know it, and sometimes, what comes after that -- it's a favorite theme, from the bible and folklore to much of popular culture)!
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rahirah: (Default)

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posted by [personal profile] rahirah at 12:15am on 19/07/2008
I think the attraction of post-apocalyptic novels to kids is that they're usually about rediscovery and rebuilding, whereas adult apocalyptic novels are usually more about "Life sucks and then you die of radiation poisoning."
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posted by [identity profile] revdorothyl.livejournal.com at 04:54pm on 22/07/2008
Excellent point!

I particularly remember being bummed out in junior high and high school when I started reading 'adult' SF (which, from the 1950's to the then-current late 1970's, could be counted on to contain a hefty dose of "Ashes, Ashes, we all fall down") and found that survival and rebuilding in the aftermath of the unimaginable world-as-we-know-it-has-come-to-an-end disaster weren't such popular themes as I'd expected, based on my reading of 'juvenile' SF.

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ext_2333: "That's right, people, I am a constant surprise." (Default)

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posted by [identity profile] makd.livejournal.com at 05:57am on 19/07/2008
I guess the author of this Newsweek article must have had a very sheltered and boring reading and viewing list as a child?

ITA.
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posted by [identity profile] spacedoutlooney.livejournal.com at 07:44pm on 19/07/2008
Clearly the writer is also not aware that fairy tales are traditionally a lot more horrific that the Disney versions. It's nothing new, really; it's just the idea of that children should be innocent and isolated from all the uglier parts of life is so prevalent nowadays, that most people have forgotten.
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posted by [identity profile] revdorothyl.livejournal.com at 04:57pm on 22/07/2008
I remember reading about how the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm and others had to be 'bowdlerized' (did I spell that correctly?) for Victorian children's protection, even before Disney got their hands on them.

The idea that children's stories should be all sweetness and light and deny the existence of evil or fear or chaos in the world is a recurring but comparatively recent fantasy in the mind of some adults!
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posted by [identity profile] texanfan.livejournal.com at 09:36pm on 19/07/2008
Or they were pretty young. The new generation always believes they invented whatever is currently popular, despite evidence to the contrary.
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posted by [identity profile] revdorothyl.livejournal.com at 04:59pm on 22/07/2008
Too true! And I've noticed that journalists don't seem to have the research skills we once expected them to display, to double-check some of those unsupported cultural or literary assumptions!
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