Earlier this week, the
New York Times published
an article discussing the appeal of dystopian YA literature. YA authors such as
Maggie Stiefvater and
Scott Westerfeld, as well as some other authors and supposedly knowledgeable people, contributed pieces to the article. However, as author Sarah Ockler
pointed out on twitter, the article lacks an opinion from an actual teen reader, which is strange since the article is mainly analyzes teens and why dystopian novels appeal to them. Once Sarah started discussing the article on twitter, I remembered that I am an actual teenager, so I thought I'd attempt to respond to their question:
What's behind the dystopian trend in novels for teenagers, and why is there so much demand for it?
Although each author in the discussion talked about one appealing part of dystopian novels, I feel like there is no one answer, no one reason why they are hugely popular, and it would be silly to discuss only one aspect of their appeal. Therefore, I will attempt to discuss a few main reasons why they appeal to teens. Or at least why they appeal to me personally.
I thought that all of the contributors to the original article brought up excellent points. I definitely agree with
Scott Westerfeld's piece, in which he discusses the appeal of the "system breakdown." I particularly like the questions he posed near the end:
What is the apocalypse but an everlasting snow day? An excuse to tear up all those college applications, which suddenly aren’t going to determine the rest of your life?
Being a high schooler nearing the second semester of my junior year, I will soon be forced to take the SAT, look at colleges, and choose where and how I am going to spend my life after high school is over. I've been told since before high school even began that it's of utmost importance that I work hard and get straight As so that I can get into the best college possible and, basically, not fail at life. So, that's what I've been doing since high school began. I've taken all the honors and AP classes available* and worked my butt off, like many of my peers have. There are nights where I've gotten no sleep, days off where I've done nothing but sit at the computer and write papers, and classes where my classmates and I do nothing but sit and complain and nearly cry about incompetent teachers, our insane workload, and how much sleep we didn't get last night. There are definitely times when I'm doing history reports or studying hours upon hours for biology that the worlds of
Uglies or
The Hunger Games or
Matched sound really, really good. I mean, no AP biology? Or AP system in general? That sounds like heaven right now. (This also relates to escapism, I suppose, which
Maggie Stiefvater discusses in her piece.)
One thing that I feel none of the articles expanded upon is that, often, dystopian novels show us what we like, what we do, or what we want, and discusses them until we realize that maybe we should rethink our values. They take something relevant to teens** and take it even further. Two examples of books that give us what we want are
Uglies and
Matched. Uglies gives us such extreme beauty so that no one has to feel self-conscious again, and
Matched gives us our perfect soul mate so that we need not worry about love and relationships ever again. However, both these seemingly nice things turn out to really suck. Both romance and looks are largely relevant in any teen's life that seeing it reflected and discussed at length in a novel is automatically intriguing, especially since both novels show why we should not go too crazy. Or, the books take something relevant or familiar and expand upon it or present it in a new way, such as
The Hunger Games does with violence and reality TV, or the upcoming
Bumped seems like it will do with pregnancy.
This kind of goes along with what author
Paolo Bacigalupi mentions in his piece:
With "Ship Breaker," a novel set in a future when oil has run out and New Orleans has drowned under rising sea levels, I was trying to illuminate the sort of world that we adults are handing off to them...Quality of life is significantly reduced from our present circumstances, and judging from teenagers' responses, they crave precisely that sort of truth-telling.
Unfortunately, the truth of the world around us is changing, and so the literature is morphing to reflect it. Teens want to read something that isn't a lie; we adults wish we could put our heads under the blankets and hide from the scary story we're writing for our kids.
I especially like the line "I was trying to illuminate the sort of world that we adults are handing off to them" because I feel as if that could have been a whole other discussion point in the article. Most, if not all, dystopian novels present a vision of the future that totally stinks. Even though these visions are purely the imagination of the author, it's not too hard to imagine them actually happening, as I suppose is the case with the novel
Shipbreaker, mentioned in the quote. (I have not read
Shipbreaker so I cannot say that for sure, but it is on my list of things to read.) The teens of today, myself included, are constantly told "you are the future, you will have jobs that no generation before you has had, blah blah blah" so it seems like the world is essentially in our hands. And I don't think I want to inherit or help create the worlds of
The Hunger Games or
Uglies because, even though they are free of AP bio, they don't seem very pleasant.
Since this post is already insanely long, I will only add one more thing to my argument: dystopian YA is appealing to teenagers because the teens in those novels are usually the ones doing the work. They get away with rebelling. Tally and her friends are the main challengers in
Uglies, Katniss in
The Hunger Games, etc. The teens in those stories actually get a chance to overcome those who don't let them speak; they can challenge the system. If I tried challenging one of my teachers, for example, I would get my butt kicked all the way to detention. Even though my generation is always told we are the future, we will change things, we don't often get a say in things until we're adults. I mean, not even a teen gets a say in the original article, and teens are who it is primarily discusses.
I don't think I really answered the NYT's question with this post, but, hey, I don't think the original contributors did either. I ended up hating this post halfway through writing it, but I spent a lot of time on it so I didn't want it to go to waste. Feel free to dissect this post, edit it because I got sick of editing, or add your own reasons or opinions on the original article in the comments.
*Except for Spanish because, even after five and a half years of taking it, I can still only discuss fruits and vegetables.
**Or anyone, really, but we are discussing teens here so I thought I would use that word instead.
[On a slightly unrelated note: Sarah Ockler is conducting a survey related to this article for a write-up of her own, so if you are between the ages of 10 and 18, go take the survey!]
. Mostly Good Girls by Leila Sales - Basically, this book is my life, plus a prep school setting and many, many moments of hilarity.
