The psychologist, the psychoanalyst and the 'extraordinary child in postwar British science fiction

This article suggests that a much earlier trend is visible in British postwar science fiction texts, analysing a cluster of novels that emerged in the 1950s: Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End (1953), William Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954) and John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos (1957). It will be argued that the groups of extraordinary children in these novels both tap into newer child-centred assertions about the threats posed by abnormal childhood, underwritten by psychology and psychoanalysis, and represent a reaction to an older progressive tradition in which children were envisaged as the single hope for a utopian future. This article will ultimately assert that the sudden appearance of extraordinary children in science fiction reflects a profound shift in assessment criteria for healthy childhood in Britain from the 1950s onwards, an issue that had become vitally important in a fledgling social democracy.
Source: Medical Humanities - Category: Global & Universal Authors: Tags: Electronic pages - Science fiction and medical humanities Source Type: research