I’m just curious. Is there a general tendency of writers of fiction for young people to create wondrous futures? Or are the predominant images of the future more dismal and dark? Those of you who are familiar with this literature, what say you? Thanks, Dopers. xo, C.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a utopian future book aimed at children/young adults. I’m sure they exist, but utopian books aren’t common in adult fiction either. In fact, the only ones that readily spring to mind are star trek novelisations. (I’m not counting future worlds that are more realistic, neither utopian or dystopian).
Interesting response. When I was a kid (don’t you hate hearing a sentence start like that?) science fiction was a genre that often consisted of stories set in the future and frequently that future was “cool” or “amazing” - in a good way, frequently technologically advanced. I think that’s much less the case today.
Young adult and Juvenile fiction go through trends the same way adult fiction does. Currently, we’re in a dystopian trend, mostly because of the popularity of Hunger Games. Previous to that we had urban fantasy and previous to that it was alternate reality (magic heavy) fantasy. In the 80s it was all about teen angst and the fantasy genre got no respect. Publishing has fashions just as much as the clothing companies. If something takes off, they’ll all try to find the next big thing that’s like the last big thing.
Lately the fiction has seemed dark. It’s much more violent and pessimistic than the YA fiction of my youth. (but then there is more YA fiction now than there was when I was young.) Even the realistic fiction all seems to be either proto chick lit fluff or kill the dog for the Newbury medal. Not much in between.
You will also find that writers tend to write series fiction for young people more than anything else. Even if it wasn’t meant to be a series, the publisher will make sure follow up books happen if the first one sells well. Series fiction sells well. Kids like characters they are already familiar with.
It’s easier to create a dystopian world in a novel than a utopia. Drama’s been described as “Man/Woman/Boy/Girl against Nature, Other People, etc.” and if things are bad, there’s more room for struggles of various kinds. Even if you have a society that appears to be a utopia, the plot tends to be how the protagonist learns the society’s evil secret.
I don’t think the dystopian trend was sparked by Hunger Games. I remember lots of childhood books that were pretty dark: the Tripods series, Winter of Fire, City Under Ground, The Girl Who Owned a City, Z for Zachariah, House of Stairs, Earth Abides, Obernewtyn…
Then there were authors who specialized in writing what we would now consider dystopian, but were then just variations of juvenile sci-fi. Just about anything by Wilanne Belden, Ray Bradbury’s shorts, H.M. Hoover, Monica Hughes, Alexander Key, Louise Lawrence… all of those wrote variations on “tragic earth-wide event or far difficult future creates an environment that has to be overcome or endured by plucky youth” theme.
I think the major difference is that in a lot of modern dystopias, even for young readers, there isn’t as much of a push to have that “happy” ending where everything turns out ok in the end. We’re a lot more ok with bittersweet or limited-victory endings now.
We’re also seeing more serialized stories, where the first dystopian book may even have a discouraging or bad ending for the heroes, because there’s a series building, and the readers can look forward to things perhaps getting better over time. Older genre books for children were very unlikely to get sequels, so they had to wrap everything up in one shortish book. Makes for a very different feel, as they had to pretty much give the protagonists all the tools and knowledge necessary to “solve” their difficulty very quickly.
Lastly, it’s hard to create a good book out of a utopia. Everything’s perfect, right? But we read stories about people overcoming something or fighting something or achieving something… which you can’t really do if everything is perfect and/or already done. So even in a story with a “wondrous future” setting, things are usually only going to be wondrous for certain people - we still have to have the reason to root for or hope for the characters.
The tech/science thing is a little different from the dystopia/utopia thing. (in my opinion) There was a big feeling back in the 50s-70s that technology and science would solve everything (except when it screwed everything up, and then better people would just make BETTER science and technology that then solved everything) - Asimov’s short stories, especially the Robots ones, are excellent examples of this.
Now, we’ve had a good 40 year run of tech and science advances, we still don’t have a moon colony or flying cars, and people still die of cancer, car accidents, or even simple infections. We’re a lot more jaded about the wondrous possibilities of science and tech now, so we don’t see it as a cure-all as much in our stories, because we don’t *believe *that it can be.
Likewise, things haven’t *changed *much in 40 years, so it seems more far-fetched to set stories of people like us casually colonizing planets or dealing with really wonderful future environments - we know now how hard all that is, and how we’re not doing so well with it now, so it isn’t as inspiring to have it as a setting or a plot device. It just makes people feel bad that we aren’t there yet. It’s like watching 2001:A Space Odyssey now - it’s a bit depressing that we thought we’d be to that point, over ten years in our PAST. Compare that to a recent space dystopia: Moon, with Sam Rockwell. Much more of a “baby-steps” approach to the setting there. (I know these are adult examples, but they’re the best ones I can think of right now.)
I don’t think that *necessarily *makes for more or less dystopic settings or themes, just that we use something different for our solutions/difficulties, and we tend to have settings that aren’t so “futuristic.” More dystopias are set on a screwed-up earth rather than on a screwed-up other planet or spaceship. Likewise, we don’t use technology as much to solve problems. Right now it appears vampire/werewolf/superhuman/alien mutations are hot - in the 80s it was “psy-powers” like mind-reading and empathic abilities, in the 90s it was “super-intelligence” like Spy Kids or Dexter’s Lab.
Right now dystopian is all the rage in YA with the evil adults concocting the most convoluted methods for killing teens that they possibly can. Why just shoot the teenagers when you can trap them in a giant maze where they will be picked off one by one? Or better yet, raise them to their teen years and then sell them off to be used to harvest organs for transplant to others? Bleh!
I think **Lasciel’**s on to something regarding the role of technology in society today. 50 years ago it was all about the promise of science to solve problems. Things were developing fast and just about all the solutions to our problems seemed within the realm of the possible. Somehow, we’ve discovered that we might not be able to solve everything, that science does have some limitations, that the Jetsons are not necessarily just around the corner. One good example of that was the Space Age. I remember the excitement of Sputnik, Yuri Gagarin, John Glenn, Gemini and Apollo. It was all about promise. Wow - what was once just a dream was coming within reach. But we discovered the reality of those dreams - that spaceships were really enormous, powerful vehicles that carried explosive fuel, that there were terrifying dangers in space flight, that just hopping on a rocket and going to Mars, now that it was almost technically feasible, was actually a daunting and enormous task, quite unlike getting in a car and driving to a different city. And I think that caused a mass re-calibration of our dreams.
But, ultimately, I think our dreams today have to be concerned with social, not technological problems, and I would be happy to read some version of literature that presented a rosy vision of the future in that realm. I don’t think there’s much out there, however, especially for youngsters.