CCBC-Net Archives
RE: Dystopias, Disasters and other Futurescapes
- Contemporary messages sorted: [ by date ] [ by subject ] [ by author ]
From: Greg Leitich Smith <greg_at_gregleitichsmith.com>
Date: Fri, 06 Aug 2010 08:42:12 -0500
I have a couple theories, but no evidence to back them up :-).
First, I agree that there seems to be relatively a lot of YA dystopia/disaster stuff. But more broadly, I think dystopias/disasters tend to be popular amongst all segments of the population and also may be kind of cyclical (but even at the bottom of the cycle, tend to be popular): In the 50s, of course, there were the likes of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Day of the Triffids and Alas, Babylon (and all those teenage death songs, but that's something else entirely. Maybe.).
In the 1970s, there were all those disaster movies, like Poseidon Adventure, Towering Inferno, Jaws, Night of the Lepus, etc. And dystopias, like Soylent Green; Planet of the Apes; and the one whose name escapes me now but involved killing everyone above 30. (Many of these, of course, were based on sci fi novels)
In the past ten years (or so), we've had Titanic, all those movies about asteroids hitting the earth, global warming disaster pics, 2012, etc. Discovery Channel even has a show called "Life After People."
Second, I wonder if dystopias simply feed into the fascination we all have with technology and civilization and the fear of what would happen without them (Can we survive at the mercy of Nature and the Elements?).
Survival novels, of course, aren't new: I believe Robinson Crusoe started it all, so much so that it spawned the genre known as "robinsonnades" (Swiss Family Robinson, Mysterious Island, etc.). Parenthetically, I won't tell you how old I was when I found out that "Robinson" wasn't the family name, but a reference to the genre :-).
Increasingly, in this day and age, I think we perhaps fear that we are servants of our tech and at the same time dependent on it. Dystopias and epic disasters typically involve survival and rebuilding civilization (or just hope), but on a grander scale than just one small group on a desert island. The fear nowadays, I would guess, is not so much being apart from technology and civilization, but that they would all be taken away from us.
Also, technology is more and more prevalent and increasing in scope and scale and at the same time, we are increasingly apart from knowing how it works. To most people, turning on a light bulb or starting a car are acts indistinguishable from magic. (There was a day and age when an automobile was an entirely mechanical contrivance and anyone could learn to take an engine apart and put it back together with relatively basic tools). Now, you a signal generator and an oscilloscope and, probably, your own IC fab.
And that, I think, may be at least part of the reason we don't see much "core science fiction" other than dystopias for YA. Core sci-fi needs more science (other than an inciting apocalyptic incident), and most people writing for children (or adults, for that matter) don't have any more background in science or engineering (or inclination to learn about them) than the rest of the population.
That said, even if writers were writing core sci-fi for teens, there still has to be something that resonates with an editor and something that that editor can get through the publisher and marketing and into the bookstores. There may just be a perception that there is no non-apocalypse YA sci-fi market. Until there is one...
Anyway, here are a couple new science fiction YAs that I enjoyed:
iences.html
Greg
Greg Leitich Smith http://www.gregleitichsmith.com http://greglsblog.blogspot.com
Message-----
From: Lynn Rutan
Sent: Thursday, August 05, 2010 5:47 PM To: ccbc-net, Subscribers of Subject: Re:
Dystopias, Disasters and other Futurescapes
Thanks everyone for your suggestions - I appreciate them! I do think I need to rephrase my question though. My initial post was SO long I probably got you all lost ;-)
My question is more a why? Why are we getting so much dystopian and so little of the themes that dominate adult science fiction? Are the authors not writing it. do publishers think there is no market? Are we as librarians and teachers generally more comfortable with a near future that is fairly familiar in the dystopias?
Lynn
Date: Fri, 06 Aug 2010 08:42:12 -0500
I have a couple theories, but no evidence to back them up :-).
First, I agree that there seems to be relatively a lot of YA dystopia/disaster stuff. But more broadly, I think dystopias/disasters tend to be popular amongst all segments of the population and also may be kind of cyclical (but even at the bottom of the cycle, tend to be popular): In the 50s, of course, there were the likes of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Day of the Triffids and Alas, Babylon (and all those teenage death songs, but that's something else entirely. Maybe.).
In the 1970s, there were all those disaster movies, like Poseidon Adventure, Towering Inferno, Jaws, Night of the Lepus, etc. And dystopias, like Soylent Green; Planet of the Apes; and the one whose name escapes me now but involved killing everyone above 30. (Many of these, of course, were based on sci fi novels)
In the past ten years (or so), we've had Titanic, all those movies about asteroids hitting the earth, global warming disaster pics, 2012, etc. Discovery Channel even has a show called "Life After People."
Second, I wonder if dystopias simply feed into the fascination we all have with technology and civilization and the fear of what would happen without them (Can we survive at the mercy of Nature and the Elements?).
Survival novels, of course, aren't new: I believe Robinson Crusoe started it all, so much so that it spawned the genre known as "robinsonnades" (Swiss Family Robinson, Mysterious Island, etc.). Parenthetically, I won't tell you how old I was when I found out that "Robinson" wasn't the family name, but a reference to the genre :-).
Increasingly, in this day and age, I think we perhaps fear that we are servants of our tech and at the same time dependent on it. Dystopias and epic disasters typically involve survival and rebuilding civilization (or just hope), but on a grander scale than just one small group on a desert island. The fear nowadays, I would guess, is not so much being apart from technology and civilization, but that they would all be taken away from us.
Also, technology is more and more prevalent and increasing in scope and scale and at the same time, we are increasingly apart from knowing how it works. To most people, turning on a light bulb or starting a car are acts indistinguishable from magic. (There was a day and age when an automobile was an entirely mechanical contrivance and anyone could learn to take an engine apart and put it back together with relatively basic tools). Now, you a signal generator and an oscilloscope and, probably, your own IC fab.
And that, I think, may be at least part of the reason we don't see much "core science fiction" other than dystopias for YA. Core sci-fi needs more science (other than an inciting apocalyptic incident), and most people writing for children (or adults, for that matter) don't have any more background in science or engineering (or inclination to learn about them) than the rest of the population.
That said, even if writers were writing core sci-fi for teens, there still has to be something that resonates with an editor and something that that editor can get through the publisher and marketing and into the bookstores. There may just be a perception that there is no non-apocalypse YA sci-fi market. Until there is one...
Anyway, here are a couple new science fiction YAs that I enjoyed:
iences.html
Greg
Greg Leitich Smith http://www.gregleitichsmith.com http://greglsblog.blogspot.com
Message-----
From: Lynn Rutan
Sent: Thursday, August 05, 2010 5:47 PM To: ccbc-net, Subscribers of Subject: Re:
Dystopias, Disasters and other Futurescapes
Thanks everyone for your suggestions - I appreciate them! I do think I need to rephrase my question though. My initial post was SO long I probably got you all lost ;-)
My question is more a why? Why are we getting so much dystopian and so little of the themes that dominate adult science fiction? Are the authors not writing it. do publishers think there is no market? Are we as librarians and teachers generally more comfortable with a near future that is fairly familiar in the dystopias?
Lynn
---Received on Fri 06 Aug 2010 08:42:12 AM CDT
