Dystopia, Part Two

(Find Part One here)

Besides being uniformly grim, there are other traits the current crop of dystopian novels share:

• A post-apocalyptic future–the story opens after an event of universal destruction so huge that humanity has to re-organize itself along new principles, usually some variation of survival of the fittest.
• A young hero trapped in circumstances seemingly beyond his/her control. Most have accepted the status quo or don’t realize there might be anything better, until something happens to shake up their complacence.
• A “quest” plot involving a journey or escape.
• Situations that get really bad before getting better.
• Authors, editors, and reviewers who are given to pretentious statements, particularly about how this story is “eerily relevant ” to modern-day events. Whatever.

But what does it all mean?

First of all, it’s a fad. It’s a new airing of a literary form that’s still relatively new, and to the young everything is new anyway. Fads come and go, and this one is no exception–agents and editors, whose job it is to see two or three years down the road, are already complaining that they’d like to see something else. But there are probably other reasons why young adults–at least some of them–are devouring grim futurist fiction right now. Here are a few possibilities:

1. Over the last several years, there’s been a general degradation of leadership, or at least how we view leadership. Bill Clinton is the first president I recall seeing on the cover of The National Enquirer, though I may have missed a few covers. The first Baby-Boomer president, he carried some vestiges of the sixties that made right-wingers froth at the mouth. Then came GW Bush, who made left-wingers froth at the mouth, just about the time that internet comment sections gave them a froth-happy outlet. Temper tends to beget more temper, so the rhetoric has escalated in a way that has probably had some effect on teens. One common characteristic of all dystopias is terrible leaders, so it’s no stretch to suppose that smashmouth politics has influenced YAt writers and readers.

2. My generation was the first to grow up with the possibility of destroying the planet. I remember backyard bomb shelters and air raid drills at school; also lying awake at night during the Cuban Missile Crisis, wondering if my home town was a big enough population center for the Commies to attack. Subsequent generations have lived with their own visions of hell-in-a-handbasket: nuclear war, environmental disaster, economic collapse. In particular, teens these days have been indoctrinated from elementary school with doom-and-gloom predictions of global warming (some version of which haunts the post-apocalypses of Ship Breaker and The Hunger Games, among others).

3. Teenagers tend to be natural self-dramatizers. It’s a result of gaining the appearance of adulthood without the perspective, when every slight is a game-changer and every flaw dooms one’s chances of success forever. Laura Miller, writing in the New York Times, proposes that most teens live in a real dystopia known as high school, a hothouse of unbridled ambition and supercharged inspection, magnified on Facebook. Those surveillance cameras (also known as peers) are everywhere, and no screwup or misstep will go unpunished. It’s always been so, but perhaps today more than ever, and readers see in the adventures of a Finn or a Nailer a metaphor of real life.

4. Every generation needs a narrative, an organizing principle to shape their idea of destiny. Are we pioneers or the last of our breed? Is the future ours or someone else’s? Can we look forward to expanding or shrinking opportunity? I’m guessing that most young readers today probably lean more toward the idea of a diminished future, which dystopian novels reinforce. But that’s where the fifth reason comes in:

5. There’s always a hero, who joins forces with one or two others to buck the tide. Going it alone is the most reliable element of dystopian fiction, and it hits teens at a time in their lives when individual determination is crucial. Until the age of twelve or so, they’re defined by family; in early adolescence they look to their peers. Now, they have to figure out who they are individually, the precise dilemma faced by the protagonists of these novels they’re reading. Todd Hewett has to find out if he’s capable of killing. Katniss Everdeen must discover if she’s capable of loving. They all have to navigate a perilous environment where one mistake could cost their lives. That’s what getting to independent adulthood can look like to a teen, especially if she’s thoughtful and introspective. These young people in extremity are characters to relate to and model, for one thing they share in common is courage.

How do Christian parents and educators respond to what the teenagers under their charge are reading? Does it warrant any sort of response at all? More to come . . .