Among Collapses and Hopes: Dystopia and Nature in Children’s Novels

This contribution sets out to examine, in narrative and pedagogic terms, the metaphors of nature found in the successful dystopic novels that are very popular among children and adolescents. Today, dystopic novels are the most popular genre among young readers: just think of the success of Suzanne Collins’ 2008 trilogy Hunger Games, or Veronica Roth’s trilogy Divergent, published from 2011, and many others dystopic novels for youth. These books tackle difficult topics such as death, poverty, anger, social unrest: despite—or perhaps precisely because of—this, young readers enjoy dystopic novels. In fact, it appears that, after decades of absence, dystopic plots have relaunched the sci‑fi genre among adolescents. In these plots, the collapse of nature is always accompanied by a political collapse: degraded nature is the result of a degraded society. The strongest message emerging from dystopic novels is: there can only be environmental and social redemption if young people can change the direction of history.