“Forget about Eden”: (Violations of) Children’s Rights in The Last Book in the Universe

Dystopian tales, both post-apocalyptic wastelands and carefully manicured ultramodern utopias, offer the opportunity to demonstrate what can happen when human rights are not respected and upheld. This paper examines the violations of children’s rights in the novel The Last Book in the Universe (Philbrick, 2000). Using the United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNICEF, 1989) as a framework for analysis, the paper investigates how science fiction can communicate children’s rights to them, through negative examples of their violations.