Contemporary Ghost Stories: Cyberspace in Fiction for Children and Young Adults

This essay identifies a genre of popular fiction for children and young adults, prevalent in the 1990s and continuing into the early twenty-first century, that incorporates computers and the internet, e-mails and chat rooms, into its plots. However, along with a focus on technology, this fiction frequently features the supernatural. So, too, ghosts have been recurring images in popular culture surrounding past emergent communications technologies. I argue that the figure of the ghost in these novels about cyberspace dramatizes the tension between the liberating possibilities of disembodiment and the desire for embodied relationships. Despite the presence of dystopian elements, this fiction remains optimistic overall about the potential of technology to connect individuals in positive ways and to create communities modeled on tolerance and inclusion.