THE ROLE OF CHILD’S PSYCHE IN AMERIAN SCIENCE-FICTION WORKS

Abstract

This article analyses the thematic and structural representation of the child’s psyche in American science fiction literature. The study uses a comparative synthesis framework to investigate how the development of American psychology from the mid-twentieth century influenced the presentation of youthful consciousness in speculative fiction. This paper examines the shift from the externalized monstrous projections of adolescent anxiety that characterized the early Cold War to the internalized, technologically integrated, and hyper-agentic models of child psychology that dominate late twentieth-century cyberpunk and contemporary speculative fiction. By looking at seminal texts such as Jerome Bixby’s It’s a Good Life, Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and William Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive, this paper shows that the sci-fi child is rarely a symbol of pure innocence. Rather, the child’s psyche is a sensitive barometer for cultural anxieties about technological acceleration, institutional manipulation and the future of human evolution