WHY TEENS (REALLY) FIND THE END OF THE WORLD SO APPEALING:
National Public Radio has never really established an audience among teens. It is, overwhelmingly, the radio station that parents choose, and that they often inflict on their teenage children while driving them around—which is, of course, something the parents of teenagers do for several hours per day. The natural mistrust of All Things Considered, on the part of teenagers, is the reason I got very nervous when I saw that Google and Pocket were spotlighting an article from NPR entitled “Why Teens Find The End of the World So Appealing.” It’s a great question, but I wondered what the sonorous, mature reporters at NPR could possibly know about this. The answer turns out to be, nothing.
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But perhaps the most important reason why teenagers like dystopian novels is that they’re old enough to start thinking about the way societies are constructed. They begin to recognize political structures and social norms as contingent entities, subject to change and varying widely. What fascinates them about dystopian novels is the attempt to engineer better societies, and each novel’s judgments about the results of those experiments. They see and judge, for themselves, what Mustapha Mond and O’Brien are doing. They do so on an equal footing with adults, and that’s precious, because the alternative to speculative fiction (including dystopian fiction) is usually the dreaded coming-of-age novel. Those lead inevitably to lectures from adults about what it means to become an adult, a genre that has never been popular with adolescents, and never will be.
Ultimately, teenagers want what everyone else wants. They want to be heard. They want to be taken seriously. They want the chance to form their own opinions about the moral and ethical issues in the literature they read. As a body, they’re not cynical, isolated, or melodramatic. So we have to ask ourselves why, all of a sudden, we should be striving to explain what teenagers like so much about dystopias and the end of the world. The answer isn’t pretty. If we can fence off dystopian novels as so much adolescent melodrama, then we adults are protected from the questions those works of art were designed to ask. “These books offer a safety net,” writes Nadworny, quoting Steinberg to the effect that kids can “flirt with [different identities] without getting into trouble” by reading dystopian novels. Meanwhile the kids are walking a rope suspended above an abyss, thankful for the writers who dispense with the safety net altogether, and let the world burn, or freeze, or change.
But is it just teens? Americans love living in a disaster movie: “The only language we have to describe our present reality comes from referencing the Hollywood films our culture churns out. ‘I’m in Times Square and it’s like I Am Legend’, a friend texted me this week. ‘I wish it was always like this’.”