Young Adult Literature: Dystopian and Science Fiction

Titles Discussed

Feed by M. T. Anderson

The Giver by Lois Lowry

The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins

Genre Overview

Writing that features teenage protagonists is, to varying degrees, inherently concerned with the experience of losing childhood innocence and gaining adult agency. This is often a process in which the shelter and protection of the family unit give way to the challenges and problems of the outside world, one through which young adults learn to see themselves as active members of a changing society. It is no surprise, then, that dystopian literature has been a popular subgenre of young adult literature for decades. In presenting nightmarish future societies that are based on contemporary culture and politics, dystopian literature aligns with the young adult experience, offering a sort of hyperreality in which the challenges of the teenage protagonist are magnified in proximity to the dystopian social landscape.

Young adults have been reading science-fiction dystopian novels in various forms for many decades. Classic novels such as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), although written for adults, have long been mainstays of the high school English classroom, while popular science fiction and its many dystopian worlds have consistently earned the attention of young readers. It was not until Lois Lowry published The Giver in 1993, however, that a book crafted as a young adult science-fiction dystopia found such wide critical and popular acclaim. This success, in turn, only hinted at the massive popularity to come for Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games trilogy, which sold tens of millions of copies and was adapted as a popular movie series released from 2012 to 2015. Following the original trilogy, Collins published the prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2020), which became a film by the same name in 2023. As dystopian series flourished, stand-alone titles such as M. T. Anderson's Feed (2002) became fast sellers while also earning significant critical praise; Feed itself was a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature. In the early twenty-first century, science-fiction dystopias were arguably the most popular, or at least best-selling, subgenre of young adult literature.

Critics point to any number of factors to explain this new popularity, most commonly citing the rapid technological innovations that have taken place since the 1990s, in particular, the rise of social media. Young adults turn to technology while forming their identity and connecting with broader cultures and peers, a phenomenon that allows new forms of connectivity and sociality while also introducing new concerns and potential problems. Science fiction allows writers to explore extremes of government surveillance and control, conformity and individuality, and consumerism through exaggerated versions of these technologies. As the contemporary political world faces ongoing wars, threats of terrorism and extremism, and potential environmental collapse, the future as it appears to young adults in the twenty-first century poses unique social questions that are particularly suited to the dystopian science-fiction genre.

Works

Lois Lowry's 1993 novel The Giver is a “false utopia,” meaning it is set in a world that strives to exist as a perfect society but is revealed over the course of the novel to instead be a dystopian reality. This world attempts to achieve its utopian elements through an extreme form of equality: people no longer see color, the climate is always the same, families and careers are decided by government committees, and memories of experiences such as pain and death have been removed from the population. Like all members of this society, the main character, Jonas, is untroubled by his lack of privacy and individuality, obeying all rules until he is assigned to be the next “Receiver.” In this position, he will absorb the memories of the past, becoming one of the only people in his society to know that colors, death, war, snow, and many other banned things ever existed. Upon gaining this knowledge, Jonas questions whether the equality of the current world is worth the sacrifice of beauty, individuality, and self-determination. He ultimately chooses to reject the community and flee for “Elsewhere.”

It is through the shift from apparent utopia to actual dystopia that The Giver explores its main themes. The third-person narration is tied closely to Jonas, and readers only gain knowledge that is also available to him. His family unit, for instance, at first looks idealized by conventional Western standards: a mother, father, son, and daughter living together with steady jobs and plenty to eat. The reader learns, however, that their connection as a family was not through birth or choice but rather through government assignment, a fact that contrasts with contemporary Western reality and introduces questions of individuality and the role of communities and governments. When Jonas inherits memories from what readers will recognize as their present (or very recent past) and is shocked to discover love, these questions are thrown into much greater relief. Finally, Jonas learns that his father's community-assigned career is not to peacefully release babies into a new life, as he had always believed, but rather to kill those with health problems or physical differences. This final revelation completely undoes any utopian ideals from that early family vision, confirming instead the nightmarish reality of the happy father who daily leaves a wife he does not love in order to go to work and kill babies.

Many dystopian science-fiction novels can be somewhat heavy-handed in putting forward their political views, and entries in the young adult genre tend to be especially pedantic in this regard. While The Giver has faced some criticism from scholars for pushing its political point too hard, its shift from utopia to dystopia also encourages readers to draw their own conclusions. By the end of the novel, Jonas has fled the community, risking his life in order to pursue freedom and electing to change the world rather than accept it as is, although even he has expressed doubts. The memories he inherited, after all, contain both the horrors of war (an impossibility in his planned community) as well as the heights of beauty and love. The Giver has a clear political position, but it also encourages its readers to ask questions about difference, conformity, and memory, with the emphasis more on asking questions than on answering them.

Eschewing the false utopia, M. T. Anderson's 2002 novel Feed instead presents a reality that quickly reveals its dystopian elements to the reader. The novel is told from the perspective of Titus, a teenager in a world where most people are connected via biological implants to a massive computer network called Feednet. Though similar to modern social networks, Feednet is much more highly advanced; people can telepathically communicate with one another, corporations constantly gather information directly from the brain, advertisements intrude on everyday consciousness, and entertainment is immediately available. Titus begins dating a teenage girl, Violet, whose feed malfunctions, eventually leading to her death. While their romance plays out, Feednet also gives Titus occasional information about his world, including updates on a devastating environmental collapse and a war between the United States and an international Global Alliance—a war the president is helpless to stop as corporations hold all the real power.

In Feed, technological advancements not only have disastrous effects on the global environment and corporate power but also radically reshape language and self-identity, as is shown through Titus's narration. The first-person narration is addressed directly to the reader, with Titus assuming that his audience has knowledge of his fast-paced world; slang, technology, and other science-fiction elements are not explained but simply presented as a given and natural element of his existence. As Titus is fairly immature and only interested in his own interior existence, however, Feed also relies on an unreliable narrator, a device that is further magnified by the constant intrusions of Feednet advertisements and announcements into the text. The end result is that readers are encouraged to sympathize with Titus while remaining aware of his failings, the most obvious of which is the way his obsession with consumerism and his feed prevent him from either caring for Violet or taking seriously the threats of environmental collapse and war that surround him. This disconnect between Titus's feed-driven mind and the lives of others becomes especially clear when Violet is days away from death. Unable to show her any compassion, Titus returns home and obsessively orders pair after pair of the same pants from Feednet. It is clear that the world is collapsing around him, but unlike with The Giver, the reader is not able to champion him as a hero and believes he will fight to change it. Instead, his identity is complicit in the destruction of his world, and the novel ends with little suggestion of hope.

The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins likewise provides a first-person narration from the perspective of the main character, in this case, a young woman named Katniss Everdeen, who manages to fight against the group mentality of her dystopia in pursuit of positive change. The novels in the trilogy—The Hunger Games (2008), Catching Fire (2009), and Mockingjay (2010)—as well as the prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2020), all take place in Panem, a future version of the United States in which society is partitioned into districts that divide the population based on class and occupation, with the ridiculously wealthy ruling class living in the Capitol. Katniss lives in one of the poorest districts, and it is from there that she is selected for the Hunger Games, a yearly event in which two youths from each district are placed in an arena to fight to the death. The games serve a dual purpose, providing both entertainment for the masses and punishment for a rebellion against the Capitol many years previous. Katniss somewhat unwittingly becomes a symbol of a new rebellion, and over the course of the trilogy, she evolves from a victor of the Hunger Games to a leader and propaganda device of the rebels. In the end, Katniss must again assert her independence—this time by killing the leader of the rebellion, a woman who has proved herself to be as cruel and power-hungry as the previous rulers in the Capitol.

The Hunger Games trilogy is ultimately concerned with Katniss as a young woman who must learn to trust herself while realizing how little she can trust those in power, whether in government or in the rebellion. The novel shares many of the themes and devices with previous dystopian science-fiction works. The Hunger Games themselves are an exaggeration of reality television, for instance, in the same way that Feednet is an exaggeration of social media. Similarly, the strict rules and stratification of her society recall the heavily controlled reality of The Giver, albeit with a significant difference: in Panem, only those in the Capitol might live with the illusion that their society is utopian, while Katniss, like the majority of the population, sees its dystopian elements from the start.

What most distinguishes The Hunger Games series is the way that Katniss develops her adult identity in a world that is duplicitous and untrustworthy. Romantically, she finds herself in the middle of a love triangle, drawn to two young men yet unable to make sense of her feelings in the complex power struggle of the Hunger Games and the subsequent rebellion. Politically, she aligns herself firmly with the aims of the rebellion, her own life being so strongly shaped by the oppression and poverty of her district yet learns quickly that this new government is going to reenact the oppressive and violent behaviors of the Capitol, even initiating a new Hunger Games for the children of the old Capitol leaders. As her actions and defiance inspire the population of Panem to take control over their own lives and fight the powers that be, Katniss craves only simplicity and safety, yet knows that these things can only be achieved by fighting.

Katniss, Titus, and Jonas are all born into worlds that seem horrifying to contemporary readers, and all three assume different strategies to navigate these realities. Jonas flees his community for a life elsewhere, Katniss elects to stay and fight, and Titus merely succumbs to the inhumanity and numbness of Feednet. There is no right or wrong way to navigate the science-fiction dystopia, and all three characters falter as often as they succeed. They all, however, exemplify that characteristic young adult experience: as they assume adulthood and express their own agency, it becomes clear that they cannot truly stand alone but instead must learn to understand themselves as members of a complex and evolving society, no matter how horrifying it might be.

Conclusions

With the massive successes of series such as The Hunger Games, Veronica Roth's Divergent trilogy (2011–13), and James Dashner's Maze Runner series (2009–16), as well as its sequel trilogy, the Maze Cutter series (2022–23), science-fiction dystopian literature appears to have a firm footing in the young adult marketplace. Rapid advancements in social media technology and mass communication continue to alter the lives of young adults, in particular, the relationship between newly independent teenagers and the political and social reality they will soon inherit. For this reason, the genre remains well suited to continue exploring these themes, transforming potential problems into horrible realities through the exaggerated world of dystopia.

Some critics, however, have questioned both the sustainability of the genre and the lasting power of recent publications. Young adult novels are written largely by adults, and as such, the writers behind these stories view new technologies from a radically different perspective than their young readers. A social media news feed, for instance, might seem terrifying to some, with its overload of information, advertisement, and surveillance, but for many young readers, it is a given and natural part of their world, present from the early moments of childhood consciousness. Just as Titus in Feed and Jonas in The Giver seem to passively accept their world at first, technologies rarely seem terrifying to those who have always known them. As more people enter the world comfortable with social media and other technological advances, some of the fears inherent in these science-fiction dystopias might seem dated or illogical in the years to come. Regardless, the best entries in this genre gain their power not as much through their reimagining of the contemporary world as through the dynamic characters they create characters that reflect the struggles and opportunities of adolescence no matter what reality they find themselves inheriting.

Further important works of young adult literature in the dystopian and science fiction genre include Marie Lu's Skyhunter duologySkyhunter (2020) and Steelstriker (2021)Cassandra Clare's Last Hours seriesChain of Gold (2020), Chain of Iron (2021), and Chain of Thorns (2023)and Joan He's stand-alone novel The Ones We're Meant to Find (2021).

Bibliography

Basu, Balaka, et al. eds. Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers. New York, Routledge, 2013.

Bradford, Clare. “‘Everything Must Go!’: Consumerism and Reader Positioning in M. T. Anderson's Feed.” Jeunesse vol. 2, no. 2, 2010, pp. 128–37. Literary Reference Center. .

Bullen, Elizabeth, and Elizabeth Parsons. “Dystopian Visions of Global Capitalism: Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines and M. T. Anderson's Feed.” Children's Literature in Education, vol. 38, no. 2, 2007, pp. 127–39. Literary Reference Center. .

Cart, Michael. Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism. 4th ed., ALA Neal-Schuman, 2022.

Day, Sara K., Miranda A. Green-Barteet, and Amy L. Montz, eds. Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction. Ashgate, 2014.

Gross, Melissa. “The Giver and Shade's Children: Future Views of Child Abandonment and Murder.” Children's Literature in Education 30.2 (1999): 103–17. Literary Reference Center, .

Hintz, Carrie, and Elaine Ostry, eds. Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults. Milton Park, Taylor and Francis, 2013.