For today's update: Dystopian Futures!
Aug. 25th, 2010 12:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ichinichinemasuHells yeah.
First, visions of Tokyo's post-apocalyptic future, when it has been taken over by nature. It's just like CLAMP, you guys. (Is it sad that that was the first thing that came to mind?)
Second, a New Yorker article on the recent rise of dystopian fiction in children's literature. Not just the Hunger Games; there are a lot of books coming out that follow suit, like Matched, which I picked up at this year's ALA; or predate the Hunger Games, like Westerfield's Uglies. It compares them to adult dystopain fiction, like 1984, which it concludes, serve more as a warning for what will happen if we continue to allow certain trends. But that's not what this YA fiction does, the article says:
In other words, the books are more about feeling disaffected and out of place and struggling to make something of yourself in a new adult world. That makes perfect sense to me. And is also probably why we're attracted to doom-and-gloom stories in high school, such as X. (Okay there are probably about a bazillion counterarguments you could make for why I read X, most prominent being wtf these characters don't make anything of themselves, but I digress).
Well, anyway. I did end up getting a free copy of Mockingjay from the job, complete with a signed book plate! Which I'm very excited about. I'm going to start reading it today. And in my daily life aside from fiction: I got my car inspected yesterday at a new place closer to my current neighborhood, and it ended up costing significantly less than last year! I was really excited.
ETA: Nothing to do with dystopias, but still cool: art made from books.
First, visions of Tokyo's post-apocalyptic future, when it has been taken over by nature. It's just like CLAMP, you guys. (Is it sad that that was the first thing that came to mind?)
Second, a New Yorker article on the recent rise of dystopian fiction in children's literature. Not just the Hunger Games; there are a lot of books coming out that follow suit, like Matched, which I picked up at this year's ALA; or predate the Hunger Games, like Westerfield's Uglies. It compares them to adult dystopain fiction, like 1984, which it concludes, serve more as a warning for what will happen if we continue to allow certain trends. But that's not what this YA fiction does, the article says:
“The Hunger Games” could be taken as an indictment of reality TV, but only someone insensitive to the emotional tenor of the story could regard social criticism as the real point of Collins’s novel. “The Hunger Games” is not an argument. It operates like a fable or a myth, a story in which outlandish and extravagant figures and events serve as conduits for universal experiences. Dystopian fiction may be the only genre written for children that’s routinely less didactic than its adult counterpart. It’s not about persuading the reader to stop something terrible from happening—it’s about what’s happening, right this minute, in the stormy psyche of the adolescent reader. “The success of ‘Uglies,’ ” Westerfeld once wrote in his blog, “is partly thanks to high school being a dystopia.”
In other words, the books are more about feeling disaffected and out of place and struggling to make something of yourself in a new adult world. That makes perfect sense to me. And is also probably why we're attracted to doom-and-gloom stories in high school, such as X. (Okay there are probably about a bazillion counterarguments you could make for why I read X, most prominent being wtf these characters don't make anything of themselves, but I digress).
Well, anyway. I did end up getting a free copy of Mockingjay from the job, complete with a signed book plate! Which I'm very excited about. I'm going to start reading it today. And in my daily life aside from fiction: I got my car inspected yesterday at a new place closer to my current neighborhood, and it ended up costing significantly less than last year! I was really excited.
ETA: Nothing to do with dystopias, but still cool: art made from books.
