i wrote a bit about this –– the appeal and necessity of books for young readers about abuse, carceral environments, torture, involuntary transformation –– in a recent article about Madness/psychiatric abuse in speculative fiction! Emphasis relevant to the above post added.
I was seventeen when I began writing Failure to Comply, having spent the majority of my life until that point consuming literature for younger readers. I clung to a particular form of fictional suffering, a particular—and, to me, familiar—kind of story. This type of story was usually oriented around some form of extraordinary medical incarceration and torture, preoccupied with the lived experience of powerlessness shared among many demographics of children. While largely marked as exaggerated and unrealistic in degree, the basic denial of bodily autonomy in many of these texts was recognizable in kind: Children’s and young adult series like Animorphs (1996-2001) by K.A. Applegate, Maximum Ride (2005-2010) by James Patterson, Virals (2010-2016) by Kathy Reichs, Unwind (2007-2015) by Neal Shusterman, and The Program (2013-2018) by Suzanne Young combine familiar motifs of carceral eugenics, literal and figurative dehumanization, and ominous demands for compliance, transparency, sanity, and purity.
These books do not necessarily take a deliberately crip, Mad lens to the experience of childhood. They don’t need to. The subjugation of children to the whims of authority figures—parents, medical practitioners, teachers, and more—is real, and children notice, gravitating toward speculative books that dispense with adult authority and depict scenes of resistance against injustice. Yet here, we see the lines between the now and the not-quite blur, for a child might read of a protagonist denied food and then emerge from their book to a locked cupboard, emerge from a story of solitary confinement to the threat of grounding, with the removal of electronic devices that connect them to the world outside a likely-nuclear home. What I mean to say here is that science fiction for young readers often has fewer barriers to overcome in its links to “real life” violence, simply because for young people, a profound and legislatively mandated denial of autonomy is an unavoidable part of daily existence.
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