Education, State and Agency in Dystopian Children’s Texts

Formulations of utopian and dystopian societies have always engaged with the politics of state power and government, since the better worlds envisaged in utopian thinking commonly rely on the interplay of individual, communitarian and political interests and concerns. Tom Moylan remarks of science fiction during the 1980s that initially it ‘changes the central power structure from the state to the corporation’ (2003, pp.136-7), but that toward the end of the twentieth century ‘the later critical dystopias move to a fresh consideration of the role of the state, eventually examining its relationship to the oppositional movements within the dystopian societies’ (2003, p.137). Such oppositional movements in late twentieth-century fiction respond to real-world unease over the directions of neo-liberal national politics and their propensity both for instituting regimes of surveillance and control, and for developing unhealthy partnerships with corporations. Thus, the fin de siècle turn which Moylan observes, involving a re-consideration of the role of the state, critiques corporate power at the same time that it interrogates neo-liberal government.