Apocalyptic "Kid-Lit" -- apparently, this is new?

[revdorothyl]

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?

Comments

[rahirah]

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."

[revdorothyl.livejournal.com]

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.