Personally I’m conflicted about the Young Adult genre in fantasy. It’s huge, and it’s been a powerful lever to launch talented new writers into the market and bring them receptive readers, although it’s come at the cost of other talented new writers who aren’t working in today’s hot commodity and are left knocking at the gate. Still, with publishing in free-fall, it’s encouraging to note that somebody’s breaking into the markets.
It’s a common perception that YA is formulaic and limited to a few essential elements. Take young protagonists, a smidgen of teamwork, a heaping helping of angst and a dash of sex, and the cake is baked. Vary the frame a little and you move from horror to teen drama, add an oppressive culture and you have dystopia. Not entirely fair, but also not entirely untrue.
When the novels are good, they’re very good, indeed. Most of them, though, will not stand up to time. There will be a few terrific novels that rise from a morass—but then, that’s true of any popular genre.
YA fantasy became a marketer’s dream with the popularity of Harry Potter. Yes, YA fantasy existed before Harry went to Hogwarts, but YA was itself a specialty, a sideline in mass marketed fiction. When parents reading to their kids got hooked on Hogwarts, a niche market went mainstream to no small effect, especially in fantasy and dystopia. An avalanche of YA fantasy novels, marketed to tweens and teens and also to their parents, followed. And from all that teenaged angst, there rose a special sub-genre: the YA fantasy dystopia, complete with intricate worldbuilding and backstory.
Before we get much further, I want to acknowledge a few things that commenters from weeks past have noted about the relationship between fiction and reality. I’m not writing about reality, but literature. It’s true that, in real life, dystopian arrangements are everywhere. They’re endemic. Even as I write this, I don’t have to walk more than a mile to find people who live crushed in numbing poverty, drug use and lack of education, a multi-generational cycle that I could easily have spiraled into myself, had I turned right at 17 instead of turning left and bumbling my way into college, had I listened to that boyfriend who insisted I didn’t really need to graduate from high school…
I suspect that you, where you are reading this right now, have similar memories and could walk a similar distance to find a like world that is not your own. But that’s not the point of dystopian fiction. If you think dystopia and The Beans of Egypt, Maine comes to mind, you’re not doing it right. Dystopias reference a universally oppressive social construction. They don’t encompass poverty and ignorance; they do encompass the power of government to oppress all citizens.
Other commenters have observed that one person’s utopia is someone else’s dystopia. From a global perspective, this is true. But we don’t live in global perspective in fiction.
In any novel, we take the position of the protagonist. There are dystopias where the ruling elite live in luxury, sleep on mink fur and dine on peacocks’ tongues, but that doesn’t mean they’re not dystopic because, even if the protagonist is of the elite but becomes a victim of the system (Minority Report and Brazil, for instance) then the protagonist becomes one of the oppressed. It doesn’t matter what the rulers are doing, we follow the protagonist. If the protagonist is caught in a systemically oppressive society that deprives everyone of freedom, then we’re looking at a dystopia.
This is all for the purposes of fiction, of course. It’s important to remember that. In reality, well….no fiction writer could have sold a story like our current national nightmare. Like the producers of HBO’s Veep related, the script would have been rejected as too far out of bounds to be believable. But we’re talking about fiction tonight.
Okay, back to YA dystopias: they’re legion. I’m not even going to try to list them. They share a critical feature that distinguishes them from “adult” dystopias like 1984 and “YA” dystopias like Hunger Games. The protagonist in adult dystopias is crushed by the system. Such an outcome serves to warn the reader: Let this trend continue and this might be your future. In other words, “adult” dystopia acts as social criticism as much as it does literature. Or, as Sam Kriss phrased it:
Great dystopia isn’t so much fantasy as a kind of estrangement or dislocation from the present; the ability to stand outside time and see the situation in its full hideousness.
In YA dystopias, the situation is different. For one thing, the reader doesn’t stand outside of the system with sufficient perspective to judge it. No, we’re in there with the protagonist, and the outcome is inevitably different than it is in “adult” dystopia. Although the quest may be costly, although allies might die, although the protagonist pays a heavy price, in YA dystopia the oppressor is overthrown; the dragon is slain; the world is saved.
Much of children’s literature pits the child against the adult world and, in “showing up” the adults, is subversive….Utopias for young readers suggest that children can achieve a state of ideality that adults cannot. [1]
This ideality holds stronger for children’s literature than it does for Young Adult, where things come out better than before, but are likely still imperfect. This is part of a progression from children’s writing, where things can be dark but must end with wholeness and restoration, through Middle Grade (see Newberry Award winners where victory is not total and some compromises must be made) and YA, where real-world conditions limit the achievability of a perfect outcome, and on to the bleak future for adults like the one envisioned by George Orwell.
Laura Miller writes of this progression, citing an essay by Kay Sambell [2], that
The adult dystopia extrapolates from aspects of the present to show readers how terrible things will become if our deplorable behavior continues unchecked. The more utterly the protagonist is crushed, the more urgent and forceful the message. Because authors of children’s fiction are “reluctant to depict the extinction of hope within their stories,” ... they equivocate when it comes to delivering a moral. Yes, our errors and delusions may lead to catastrophe, but if—as usually happens in dystopian novels for children—a new, better way of life can be assembled from the ruins would the apocalypse really be such a bad thing?
We shall let the final sentence and its similarity to comments by certain politicians pass in silence.
Laura Miller looks in particular at what is arguably the best of the popular YA dystopias, The Hunger Games, and what’s really driving the novels, and it’s not an uprising in Panem. Suzanne Collins conceived the novel series as a mashup of the myth of the Minotaur, gladiators, reality tv and footage from the Iraq war. The series is undeniably popular and compelling, even though the protagonist, Katniss, isn’t entirely likeable and isn’t entirely successful, but manages to wring a kind of messy victory out of a difficult climax. Miller writes that
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.
For openers, the conditions that govern the politics in post-apocalyptic Panem don’t make a lot of sense. The Hunger Games themselves, for instance. They were instituted as punishment for a rebellion in which one region was destroyed. As punishment, two children from each of the remaining districts are taken by lottery and put into gladiator-type games, where the kids are expected to fight to the death, and the whole thing packaged for tv and sold as entertainment—it’s The Running Man, only with adolescents. Yet, participation in the kill-or-be-killed contest is considered an honor. Miller explains the internal contradiction thus:
As a tool of practical propaganda, the games don’t make much sense. They lack that essential quality of the totalitarian spectacle: ideological coherence. You don’t demoralize and dehumanize a subject people by turning them into celebrities and coaching them on how to craft an appealing persona for a mass audience.... Are the games a disciplinary measure or an extreme sporting event? A beauty pageant or an exercise in despotic terror? …. And the practice of carrying off a population’s innocent children and commanding their parents to watch them be slaughtered for entertainment—wouldn’t that do more to provoke a rebellion than to head one off?
Good point. It also doesn’t make a lot of sense that the conspirators in the Capital, powerful forces in their own right, would want or need to recruit Katniss to make their plan work. The world of Panem isn’t externally or psychologically coherent, so don’t even bother trying to consider it a good-faith extrapolation of what might be social criticism.
But what if it’s not supposed to be a realistic social representation? What makes The Hunger Games YA is it’s target audience: the novels reflect the upheaval (social and psychological) associated with adolescence and, specifically, high school.
If ... you consider the games as a fever-dream allegory of the adolescent social experience, they become perfectly intelligible. Adults dump teen-agers into the viper pit of high school, spouting a lot of sentimental drivel about what a wonderful stage of life it’s supposed to be. The rules are arbitrary, unfathomable, and subject to sudden change. A brutal social hierarchy prevails, with the rich, the good-looking, and the athletic lording their advantages over everyone else. To survive you have to be totally fake.
Which is pretty much what Katniss and the rest of the Tributes are forced to do in order to survive, or not. The losers die public deaths for the entertainment of the masses. Sounds just like high school. Temporary alliances crack under pressure. Survival depends on faking it until making it. Adolescence all over.
Other dystopian YA novels fit this same model: Scott Westerfield’s Uglies, James Dashner’s Maze Runner, Robert O’Brien’s Z For Zachariah, Lois Lowry’s The Giver, Veronica Roth's Divergent.... the list is nearly endless. It’s become something of a formula.
That makes three major features that distinguish YA dystopias from mainstream ones: 1) they're popular and sell well; 2) the conclusions offer hope that All Is Not Lost, with extra points if our protagonist gets to save the world; 3) the novels are more fabulist in nature and mirror the social and psychological upheavals particular to adolescence.
It would be easy (and cheap) to dismiss YA dystopias as mere coming-of-age escapism, but that would be a mistake. Understanding what drives a narrative doesn’t damage its appeal, but makes it more comprehensible. While some mature readers sniff at YA (and I have to confess to a bit of snobbery, myself, although I’m trying to do better) that’s a mistake. If this class of novels helps any kid navigate the minefield between child- and adult-hood, that’s reason enough to take it seriously. If it manages to entertain and provoke thought, so much the better. If it holds up as good fiction, that’s the best of all worlds.
Notes
1. “Forward,” Jack Zipes. In Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults. Carrie Hintz and Elaine Ostry, eds. Children’s Literature and Culture, Vol. 29. NY: Routeledge, 2003.
2. Kay Sambell. “Presenting the Case for Social Change: The Creative Dilemma of Dystopian Writing for Children.” In Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults. Qtd. in Laura Miller.