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"Did you know that according to the UN every human has the right to clean water every day (laughs)? And to electricity (laughs)? But that doesn't mean they have it. It's like human rights; it doesn't really exist" (Deszcz-Tryhubczak). I heard this rather disheartening comment from Philip, a sixteen-year-old participant of a reader response study that I conducted in Wroclaw, Poland, in 2014.1 One of the aims of the study was to investigate young readers' responses to Radical Fantasy Fiction, a recent development in the fantasy genre. Philip's remarks were occasioned by our discussion of China Miéville's Un Lun Dun (2007), a fantasy novel about economically and politically oppressed groups that subvert a coalition of capitalists and politicians. Milek, another sixteen-year-old participant of the same discussion group, offered a similarly discouraging comment: "We want to be treated like adults and we don't know why no one treats us like adults, but I realized why I wasn't treated like adult: I really wasn't one" (Deszcz-Tryhubczak).
Philip's and Milek's comments shed a skeptical light on Miéville's novel. Un Lun Dun arguably envisions children as rights-bearing subjects whose actions can have significant impact on social policies. The novel concludes with the twelve-year Deeba confronting Ms. Elizabeth Rawley, British Secretary of State for the Environment. Rawley had conspired with the Prime Minister to deploy the Smog, a cloud-like pollutant that has come to life, as a chemical weapon. The very idea of a teenage girl storming into a minister's office to demand transparent policies is a literary representation of a child insisting on her rights, specifically as articulated in Articles 12, 13, and 24 in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Articles 12 and 13 require that children should be informed, involved, and consulted about all decisions influencing their lives, while Article 24 guarantees children the right to a safe and clean environment. Commenting on the conception of childhood underlying the CRC, Jacqueline Bhabha argues that the Convention romanticizes and idealizes children, simultaneously disenfranchising and disempowering them: The CRC posits a child who is "at once separate from adulthood because [it is] particularly vulnerable, and thus deserving of special protection, and at the same time similar but inferior to adulthood in its capacity for...