The Expendable Child: Intergenerational Conflicts in Contemporary Climate Fiction

Focusing on intergenerational conflicts in climate fiction for young adults, this article argues that disputes between adult and child perspectives in children’s books take a more radical turn in the dystopian young adult (YA) novels The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (2012), The Marrow Thieves (2017) and A Children’s Bible (2020). In the context of English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher education aimed at upper secondary school, these novels raise issues of adult failings and intergenerational conflict in relation to apocalyptic scenarios, and exemplify how adults characterized as evil or naïve fail to shoulder even basic responsibilities, thereby leaving children to fend for their own survival. The portrayal of children as exposed, vulnerable or even expendable is shown to undermine common didactic impulses to invest hope in the capacity of future generations to amend the shortcomings of the present. Further, disrupted narrative chronologies undermine the idea of futurity as linear progression; instead, it is left to the child characters to incessantly look backwards to restore fragments of lost culture, stories and language. In drawing an analogy between the novels and Modernist narratives, it is suggested that reading practices that creatively and collaboratively deal with cultural historical perspectives as well as narrativity connect the present to the past and build resilience through an understanding of how stories shape our perception of the future. We argue that a heightened awareness of narrativity and discourse can contribute to perspective changes that may be necessary in response to contemporary challenges in the Anthropocene.