Tomorrow isn’t what it used to be. The latest trend in young adult fiction features visions of the future, and most of them are pretty grim. In Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games (Scholastic, 2008), the teenagers of a fractured future U.S.A. are pitted against one another in televised battles to the death. In Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker (Little, Brown, 2010), the oil has run out and child laborers dismantle obsolete supertankers on the beaches of the Gulf Coast. Moira Young’s striking debut, Blood Red Road (S & S/Margaret K. McElderry Bks., 2011), pits its young heroine against the perils of a post-catastrophe world, while Jo Treggiari’s Ashes, Ashes (Scholastic, 2011) vividly describes a flooded, quake-prone Manhattan depopulated by deadly plagues. I mention those four in particular because I happen to have read them, and know them to be very good, but there are many more YA dystopias already published or forthcoming. What is it about these grim futures that young readers find so appealing?

Dystopias, of course, are nothing new. Ever since H. G. Wells’s Martians trashed London back in 1898, science fiction has delighted in showing us our world in ruins. There was no YA genre as such when I was a young adult, but I grew up reading grim tales of life after the bomb by such authors as Robert C. O’Brien and Russell Hoban, or in the totalitarian states of George Orwell’s 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, while John Wyndham and J. G. Ballard provided eerie visions of futures blighted by everything from killer shrubs and melting ice caps to runaway crystallization. With influences like those, it’s little wonder that some of the worlds I’ve imagined in my own novels have strong dystopian elements.

The attraction of such stories for teenage readers is clear. Stuck in those awkward years between childhood and full adulthood, bridling against the authority of parents and high school teachers, they can draw a bleak satisfaction from imagining adult society reduced to smoking rubble. They are also, perhaps, becoming aware of the deep injustices in the wider world, which dystopian fiction often reflects. I know that some people find it distasteful when an author simply relocates to North America or Western Europe the sorts of poverty and oppression that are all too common elsewhere (scrap yards like the one in Ship Breaker already exist in India, for instance). But by visiting such woes on teenagers like themselves, these stories may make it easier for young readers to think about them, and to imagine what it might be like to live in a police state or a shantytown.

Or maybe it’s just cool to mentally recast yourself as a rebel against some future tyranny. There’s a strong element of wish fulfillment in dystopian fiction. When you’re a teenager, the prospect of having to leave home and make your own way in society can seem such an alarming one that it’s perversely comforting to picture that society swept away. Treggiari’s Ashes, Ashes is a powerful expression of this fantasy: its heroine, Lucy Holloway, has always considered herself plain, clumsy, and “not good at anything”; she’s unnoticed by her teachers and unpopular with her classmates—but she has the last laugh when all the jocks and prom queens are wiped out by mutant smallpox, leaving her to live by her wits in the ruins of Central Park.

In the end, despite some well-depicted self-doubt, Lucy proves more than capable of looking after herself. That’s something she has in common with the protagonists of most of the recent dystopian novels. Each features a strong hero or heroine who survives by intelligence, resourcefulness, and good old-fashioned pluck. There’s no room here for Ballard’s apathetic heroes who listlessly come to accept their transformed worlds, nor for doomed rebels like Orwell’s Winston Smith or Huxley’s Savage. The Hunger Games’s Katniss Everdeen would never be persuaded to love Big Brother; she’d be far more likely to lead a rebellion and overthrow him. The others might not go that far, but they’d certainly escape from Room 101 and light out for 1984’s equivalent of the Territory. I’m sure that it’s this, as much as the postapocalyptic backgrounds, that explains the success of these books. The settings may be nihilistic, but the message that an individual can make a difference and that courage and ingenuity can triumph even in the most dreadful circumstances, is anything but.

And yet my brief tour of contemporary dystopias has left me feeling slightly uneasy. I mean no criticism of any particular book, but when viewed as a genre “YA Dystopian” seems to be lacking something.

A sense of humor, for instance. The end of the world is just no fun anymore. The dystopian stories that I encountered as a young teenager were often grim, but at the same time, there were many that took their lead from Dr. Strangelove, the funniest and most potent movie of the Cold War, and treated the threat of thermonuclear Armageddon as pure black comedy. Douglas Adams’s The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy isn’t usually classified as dystopian, but it starts with the demolition of the Earth and the death of almost the whole human race, and still manages to be wildly funny. That element of satire and graveyard humor seems largely absent from the current crop of dystopias. Where’s the modern, YA equivalent of Kurt Vonnegut? The apocalypse, we seem to be teaching young readers, is something that you have to take seriously....

More worrying still is the absence of any counterbalance. Half of the science-fiction stories that I read in my teens seemed to predict terrible ends for us all, but the other half concerned themselves with bright, shining futures in which human beings would spread out among the stars, having overcome such trifling problems as poverty, war, and racial prejudice. As far as I’m aware, no one in the YA field is writing things like that anymore: if they are, their books have yet to achieve the same high profile as the dystopias. It’s as if optimism has become so hopelessly quaint that we can no longer allow ourselves even to imagine a better future.

YA authors didn’t invent this profound pessimism, of course: predictions of catastrophe pervade modern Western culture. Politicians and the media thrive on a culture of fear, and love to make our flesh creep by inflating remote threats like terrorism or swine flu to apocalyptic proportions. The environmental movement has gloomy sci-fi scenarios of its own to peddle and seems increasingly intolerant of any suggestion that progress is good, or that science might provide us with ways to ease the world’s ills. I frequently meet young people nowadays who have been led to believe that human beings are inherently wasteful and stupid, and (chillingly) that there are Far Too Many Of Us. It’s hardly surprising that, when they picture the future, they tend to see themselves snacking on refried schnauzer in a tar-paper shack.

Yet the world in which we now live is actually far closer to the hi-tech futures that the optimists of the 1950s and ’60s envisioned than to any of the blighted wastelands that the doomsayers predicted. It’s true that many of science fiction’s sunnier visions seem naive today: racism and war persist; spindle-shaped rocket ships can’t carry us to Mars, and I still haven’t got the jet pack and flying car that I remember being promised. Yet in many ways, our society is kinder and safer, and some of today’s technologies are far more impressive than flying cars. Some of this may have come about precisely because the children of earlier generations were excited by fictional visions of a brighter future and ended up as the scientists and social reformers, innovative engineers and hi-tech entrepreneurs who helped to make it happen. What sort of future awaits a society whose young people are taught that there’s nothing to look forward to but decline and disaster, and that decline and disaster may be all that they deserve?

It’s entirely natural that YA authors should try to reflect the fears about the future that young readers feel, but I’m coming to think that we also have a duty to challenge the prevailing pessimism of mainstream culture. Dystopian fiction, while appearing to offer a radical criticism of modern society, is often deeply conservative. Portraying our civilization as doomed, it looks to the past for answers—to the rugged individualism of the frontier spirit, or a meek retreat to preindustrial ways of life. I’m happy to celebrate and recommend the excellent dystopian novels that I mentioned above, and I’m certain that there are many others every bit as fine, but I think what we could really use right now are a few utopian novels to set beside them.