No End in Sight for Dystopian Fiction's Popularity

Dystopian fiction is thriving as news stories about global warming, world pandemics, and violent human intolerance of every kind--racial, religious and sexual--inspire tales of a terrifying future for humanity. It's no fluke that The Hunger Games series sells books and movie tickets. My book club is naturally tapping into the trend, recently reading Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, a tale of technological and social collapse after mass depopulation by a virulent flu strain. Back in 2011, we read the dystopian classic The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, set in a Thailand inundated by global warming and decimated by megacorporate "calorie company" biotech tinkering. Contemplating the popularity of apocalyptic fiction, it's clear the best dystopian novels not only hold up a mirror to shared fears for the future, they also are essentially hopeful rather than hopeless literary expressions. After all, if enough people are convinced by the writer's vision that failure to change now will lead to disaster down the road, they may be spurred to avert the forecast doom. Consider the lasting impact of these seminal dystopian works: 1984 by George Orwell, published in 1949, with its eerie prescience about the rise of "Big Brother" government and its Newspeak; Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, a 1953 Cold War classic about a society where books and independent thought are banned; 1962's A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess about the culture of violence, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, a 1968 vision of a world dominated by androids. Today's writers tackle a new crop of fears along with the standard war, famine and plague. But the best dystopian novels still use the same formula for success: They go beyond technical and socio-political jargon to connect with the human heart, breaching our defenses against unpleasant truths with compelling characters and emotions. For a list of some top dystopian reading, go to http://www.shortlist.com/cool-stuff/20-best-dystopian-novels

Young Adult Fiction's Star Keeps Rising

Young Adult literature is experiencing a new golden age. Just consider the impact on popular culture, including movies spawned, of the Harry Potter series, the Twilight novels, the Hunger Games books, and Markus Zusak's award-winning The Book Thief. As YA and children's fiction crosses over to generate adult fans and purchasers, watch for adult fiction writers to follow and adapt/adopt these popular YA trends, as identified by Millhouse Press: dystopian tales (The Hunger Games); special needs protagonists (My Brother Charlie is an example); paranormal romance with vampires and more (such as Beautiful Creatures, a 2013 movie, too); mythology-based fantasy (see the Goddess Girls series); return of the venerable diary/journal format (such as Diary of a Wimpy Kid); and multimedia (exemplified by the Skeleton Creek series). But what's coming next? Writers want to strike gold with the next hot trend, not mine an exhausted vein. A recent story by Husna Haq in The Christian Science Monitor suggests that vampire-zombie-werewolf romance, Potteresque magical fantasy and dystopian adventure all may be running out of steam at last, and cites these hot new YA content predictions courtesy of Bookish.com editors: novels about a "loveless future," where teens struggle against societies seeking to eradicate love; modernized fairy tales, perhaps with a cyborg Cinderella or an unusual viewpoint, such as the not-so-wicked witch or stepmother (Disney seems to be tapping into that with its Maleficent film); a rise in male protagonists to end the long reign of girl power a la Katniss Everdeen; and a melding of YA with cyberpunk virtual reality and AI villainy (James Dashner's The Eye of Minds is an example). Some of the 2014 YA debuts certainly fit those new categories. For a list of the best YA of 2014, see the Young Adult Library Services Association's picks at http://www.ala.org/yalsa/2014-best-fiction-young-adults