Glassworks
  • home
  • about
    • history
    • staff bios
    • community outreach
    • affiliations
    • contact
  • current issue
    • read Issue 26
    • letter from the editor
    • looking glass spring 2023
    • interview with Raina J. Leon
    • interview with Sarah Fawn Montgomery
  • submit
    • submission guidelines
  • looking glass
    • through the looking glass
  • editorial content
    • book reviews
    • opinion
    • interviews
  • flash glass
    • flash glass 2023
    • flash glass 2022
    • flash glass 2021
    • flash glass 2020
    • flash glass 2019
    • flash glass 2018
    • flash glass 2017
    • flash glass 2016
    • flash glass 2015
  • media
    • art
    • audio
    • video
  • archive
    • award nominees
    • read and order back issues
  • Master of Arts in Writing program
    • about Writing Arts at Rowan University
    • application and requirements
  • newsletter
  • home
  • about
    • history
    • staff bios
    • community outreach
    • affiliations
    • contact
  • current issue
    • read Issue 26
    • letter from the editor
    • looking glass spring 2023
    • interview with Raina J. Leon
    • interview with Sarah Fawn Montgomery
  • submit
    • submission guidelines
  • looking glass
    • through the looking glass
  • editorial content
    • book reviews
    • opinion
    • interviews
  • flash glass
    • flash glass 2023
    • flash glass 2022
    • flash glass 2021
    • flash glass 2020
    • flash glass 2019
    • flash glass 2018
    • flash glass 2017
    • flash glass 2016
    • flash glass 2015
  • media
    • art
    • audio
    • video
  • archive
    • award nominees
    • read and order back issues
  • Master of Arts in Writing program
    • about Writing Arts at Rowan University
    • application and requirements
  • newsletter
Glassworks

Trouble in Paradise: Dystopian Distaste

2/1/2017

0 Comments

 
by Amanda Rennie
​

The world is dark, dismal, messy; there is a teenager who is, believably, old enough, clever enough, mature enough, independent enough to make life-altering decisions. 16 or 17 is a good age because then they can rebel against adults, not go to school, and have an intense and passionate relationship. This teenager isn't like all the other teenagers. This teenager can make a difference.​
Yawn. It started with the vampire craze, but the publishers of young adult fiction have fully submersed themselves in Dystopia: everywhere and everything is terrible, and only one young person has the ability to change it and make the world a better place. Young adult authors, lots of them, have been churning out trilogies (ALWAYS trilogies) with the same stock characters and fabled ending for years now. And guess what? It's only becoming more generic.
PictureOrwell's "1984" Image credit: jason ilagan via flickr
Many of us are familiar with, if not well read in, dystopian novels of the past, like Orwell’s 1984 or Animal Farm, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, or Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Something about Orwell and Bradbury’s stories, and whatever other dystopian stories still read in literature classes today, make them timeless. But what a dystopian novel is for teenage readers now and what it was for adult readers then differs greatly. For adults, the stories are actual allegorical social commentary. They have a real lesson. They contain complex and harrowing metaphors. Sometimes, they are scary and uncomfortable. But for teenage readers now (and adults (okay, me)) it seems to be nothing more than a shallow metaphor for a world that needs change, just beginning to skim off the top of a real social issue. Dystopian fiction is supposed to have something to say – a greater metaphorical meaning that invokes change or provokes thought, and modern YA dystopian novels aren’t doing this. Instead, it’s “worry not! It's nothing that a love triangle, some cliché action scenes, and a happy ending can't fix!” It’s like the author wants to open the reader’s eyes to something, but it’s too scary, too much of a commitment, to actually follow through. But here’s the truth: the world is scary sometimes.

PictureImage credit: cpmacdonald via pixabay
​​Don't get me wrong - I love The Hunger Games. It is one of my favorite series of all time, and I reread it every New Years (Suddenly, I am thinking this is subconsciously symbolic). But I also blame Suzanne Collins for jumpstarting this era of YA dystopia. Maybe it’s my own bias, but Collins had something to say. She did it, and, in my opinion, she did it well. Therefore her story and characters exploded into something huge where suddenly the entire world couldn’t get enough. Why wouldn’t a budding author want to follow in those footsteps and ride the waves of her success? Perhaps “Why shouldn’t they?” is the better question. It has skyrocketed multiple authors into fame, with book deals, movie deals, and lots of Twitter followers.

At this point, it’s becoming more about consumption than about having something, a message or a moral, to say. I guess it is understandable - authors have to make a living, too.  How many times can a person and then another person and then another person say the same thing until it becomes redundant? Not many.
Veronica Roth is one of the only YA dystopian authors in recent memory who attempted to break what seems like the editorial checklist for a successful YA dystopian novel, but she blew up her entire story at the same time in an effort to be inventive. Spoiler alert: (but quite honestly if you haven't read Divergent by now, you were never going to): you don't kill your main character and get away with it. Even having done that, though, her trilogy didn’t “say” much more than The Hunger Games did. Plus, people, including myself, were mad at her for not following the specified formula thoroughly.
I can’t help but wonder if this dystopian era of young adult fiction is nothing more than a fad. Maybe I almost hope that it is. The supernatural, vampire phase fizzled out pretty quickly just a couple of years ago. While there is a good premise to dystopian fiction, it is probably time for us to move on and figure out something else to say, or even a way to say it better. I don’t think the next generation of kids will be reading The Maze Runner in their middle school reading classes, but I do think that they will read Animal Farm.  Sometimes, this trend makes me worry that there are no stories left to tell because these commercialized authors seem to be forcing themselves to write into these popular genres. I guess I shouldn’t complain; dystopia is much more interesting than vampires and werewolves and more vampires. So, do I have an unpopular opinion and these books are actual literary canon? Only time will tell. May the odds be ever in their favor.
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Archives

    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    September 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    September 2018
    August 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    February 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    February 2017
    November 2016
    September 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    September 2015
    August 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    October 2014
    April 2014
    January 2014
    March 2013
    February 2013


    Categories

    All
    Art
    Audio
    Bestseller
    Bibliotherapy
    Books
    Bookstores
    Career
    Cartoons
    Censorship
    Characters
    Cliche
    Code-switching
    Comedy
    Comics
    Controversy
    Culture
    Dyslexia
    Dystopian
    E-books
    Editorial
    Education
    Emoji
    Encyclopedia
    English
    Facebook
    Fandom
    Fanfiction
    Fantasy
    Fiction
    Film
    Future
    Gamebooks
    Gender
    Genre
    Google
    Grammar
    Habits
    Halloween
    Health
    Identity
    Journaling
    Kinesthetic Learning
    Language
    LGBTQ
    Library
    Literacy
    Literature
    Manga
    Marginalia
    Media
    Mental Health
    Multimodal
    Music
    New Media
    New York Times Best Seller List
    Nihilism
    Nonfiction
    Normalcy
    Nostalgia
    Obscenity
    Op Ed
    Opinion
    Pandemic
    Podcast
    Poetry
    Politics
    Process
    Pronouns
    Publishing
    Race
    Reading
    Rebuttal
    Research
    Rhetoric
    Rules
    Science Fiction
    Search
    Self-publishing
    Sequels
    Series
    Sexism
    Social Media
    Spoken Word
    Sports
    Standards
    Storytelling
    Student Writing
    Superheroes
    Teaching
    Technology
    Television
    The New York Times
    Trigger Warnings
    Trilogy
    Video Games
    Visual Novel
    War
    Wikipedia
    Workshop
    Writing
    Young Adult
    Zines


    RSS Feed


Picture

glassworks is a publication of
​Rowan University's Master of Arts in Writing
260 Victoria Street • Glassboro, New Jersey 08028 
glassworksmagazine@rowan.edu
​All Content on this Site (c) 2023 glassworks
Photos used under Creative Commons from RomitaGirl67, ** RCB **, George Fox Evangelical Seminary