Children's space stories are ready to take off again

I write fiction for young people because I love the infinite imaginative space it offers. Children and young adults are incredibly open to the literature of the fantastic. So far this century, we've enjoyed stories about magic and wizards, vampires and werewolves, and post-apocalyptic dystopias. Yet the most fantastic subject of all remains unexplored territory: space.

When I was a child, spaceflight was a thrilling reality. The Apollo and Soyuz missions promised to extend our reach to the stars. Space exploration fuelled an explosion of stories during the postwar years in comics such as Dan Dare and Tintin's Destination Moon, and in TV programmes and films such as Doctor Who, Star Trek and Star Wars. Yet even back then, space novels written specifically for young readers were hard to find.

They disappeared completely with the decline of space exploration in the 1980s and 1990s. But the new century has seen a re-ignition of interest in space. Star Wars is even bigger now than it was in the 1970s, its ubiquitous reach extending to sequels, prequels, an animated series, even Lego. Star Trek is enjoying a renaissance helped by JJ Abrams's reboot, while Doctor Who's popularity has grown exponentially since Russell T Davies relaunched it in 2005. The announcement of Peter Capaldi as the 12th Doctor last weekend brought together a global audience of all ages, celebrating an alien character on a scale that's surely unprecedented.

Space science has been enjoying a revival, too. Nasa's Mars Rover has restored a sense of discovery. Breakthroughs in astronomy have revealed a truly mind-bending universe: hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars. The extraordinary images captured by the Hubble telescope have a grandeur that only amplifies the awe people have always felt when looking up at the stars.

Such iconic images, collected in the Visions of the Universe exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, are deeply thrilling to young people, who are also the most enthusiastic followers of figures such as Professor Brian Cox. His TV programmes, Wonders of the Solar System and Wonders of the Universe, mean as much to young people today as Carl Sagan's Cosmos meant to people such as Cox – and myself – decades ago.

Yet children's fiction has somehow remained adrift from these developments. Where are all the epic new space stories for young readers? Occasionally, there's a novel in which space is an ingredient. Frank Cottrell Boyce's Cosmic is one example, as is Sally Gardner's Carnegie Medal-winning Maggot Moon. But full-blown epic space stories have yet to enjoy anything like the visibility in children's books that they enjoy elsewhere.

The prevailing wisdom in children's publishing is that space is a hard sell. Everyone is a little scared of it. No one knows why. I've discussed this with authors, publishers, booksellers, librarians; we all acknowledge that it's an anomaly.

Some argue that space fiction tends to the kind of techno-fetishism that appeals only to older men. This seems to me a caricature of what space fiction can be. Others believe prose can never capture the majesty of space as powerfully as film. I think this is nonsense too. Words draw on each reader's personal stock of images, and can be as intensely evocative as pictures. Besides, children's literature has a rich tradition of illustration; it can use pictures as well as words if it wants to!

Happily, there are signs that the tide is turning. Puffin has been commissioning Doctor Who ebooks from some of our best children's writers, including Eoin Colfer (who also wrote a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy sequel), and the new children's laureate, Malorie Blackman. Increasingly over the last year, I've heard it whispered that "space is the next big thing in children's books".

I hope that's true, because I've spent the last seven years writing Phoenix, a space epic for readers of nine and up, set in a galaxy where humans and aliens are at war. It's about a human boy who has strange dreams of the stars, and a ferocious alien warrior girl. Together, they must find a way to save the galaxy.

I wanted my story to reflect all the things I find electrifying about space: the science of space flight, supernovae, black holes, dark matter, but also the mythic dimension; the sense that there is something transcendent and numinous about the stars. I'm fortunate enough to collaborate with the artist Dave McKean, whose breathtaking illustrations for Phoenix draw on the Hubble photography we both love. We wanted to create a book that would make readers feel like they really were flying through space; a beautiful physical object as well as a thrilling and thought-provoking story.

The stars evoke so many profound themes. They pose the biggest questions imaginable, making us consider our place in the universe, and what it means to be alive in it. We now know that every atom in existence originated in the heart of an exploding star; everything is connected by this shared origin. What does that mean for how we should behave – ethically, politically, ecologically?

"From the stars we all came," is a key phrase in Phoenix; it's a greeting used by the alien characters. These aliens have horns and hooves and flaming eyes – partly because I think it looks amazing, but more importantly, because I wanted to write about the demonisation that accompanies so many conflicts. Aliens offer such a resonant metaphor for otherness in our own world, and perhaps even a means of thinking our way through it.

The single word "aliens" infallibly brings a classroom to irrepressible excitement, as I've discovered when visiting schools around the country over the last decade. There's definitely a massive appetite for compelling, page-turning space stories among young readers.

So I would like to call on all writers, publishers and sellers of children's books. Don't be scared. It can be done. Readers are just waiting for it. This is the moment for children's fiction to go to the next generation.