Alison Theresa

to Substack, to normal, to questions

Questions

Why is the presence of children a signal of hope in novels about catastrophes?

Why are children presented as different beings to the adults they’ll become?

Why do we talk about having children as a choice:

• as though reproduction is always within our control
• as though the opinions of the people we love don’t influence what we feel our ‘choices’ are

What does it mean if children are a signal of hope in the future, yet more and more people are not having children? Have we lost hope in our future? Is that a bad thing?

Thinking

My working title for the critical portion of my PhD is Dystopian Hope: Reproduction and Ethical Futures in Climate Fiction.

I’ve been thinking a lot about children as plot device in novels of catastrophes, especially cli fi. The use of children in these novels is usually one of two possibilities:

a) the hope that the children born in the present will save the future from the present-day disaster; or

b) that having children in the present will provide motivation for us as a collective to make improvements for the future.

The first of these speaks to one of my major dislikes about how many parents assume their children will be better people than they are, but also that that means they can stop trying to improve themselves. Passing the burden of purpose to the new generation, etc. And yet, who is a parent and who isn’t and how those murky overlapping groups use and misuse the idea of children is nowhere near that clear cut.

My novel includes a character whose ‘choice’ shifts into wanting to have children, based on the changing of the world around her. She’s unable to describe this shift to her partners though, and the novel’s protagonist struggles to forgive her.

I’m reading Lee Edelman’s No Future, which is dense and difficult but is helping me understand how to think about and use my characters motivations around children – both shifting and static motivations – to think about the future, and hope, in my novel. I will have many more questions!