So I've read The Hunger Games, Divergent, Delirium, Wool, Inside Out, The Bone Season, and recently Laline Paull's novel "The Bees." For the most part I've enjoyed them - but how do they stack up against the work of classic dystopian writers such as George Orwell or Suzy McKee Charnas?
What's
not missing is some quality writing, with strong characters and intense settings. I think the opposite is true, this is a real strength of the genre right now and it's very clear , if only from the sales figures, that these books have been ensnaring and captivating new readers. So what's missing?
1. Originality While there are a lot of original concepts in all of the above books, there are also a lot of unoriginal ones: like the walled city, the fascist police, the rigid caste system, the unfair division of wealth, the outcast hero and of course the love affair that spans all boundaries. It all makes a good
literary drinking game to play at your book group, but the result is a kind of create-a-dystopian-society-by-the-numbers. As if to prove the point, random YA dystopia generators have sprung up
here and
here.
It's a kind of laziness - save time developing your own backstory by referring to someone else's. To be fair it's not unique to this genre at all, it's something that occurs throughout literature. The result is a backstory that doesn't feel credible and doesn't connect to the real world. An exception is "The Bees" where the walled hive and the caste system make sense as the main characters are bees.
2. Social Commentary George Orwell's "1984" was driven by the development of Communism into a totalitarian state, and the fear that this could be the future of the world. "A Walk To The End Of The World" by Suzy Mckee
Charnas is a feminist novel taking male oppression to a seriously extreme conclusion. While the new-ish wave does seem to care about class or wealth inequalities, these feel like easy targets but there's no real attempt to criticise or satirise present-day countries, societies, governments or political trends.
3. Hardcore suffering Kurt Vonnegut's famous advice to writers (summarised here) includes the following gem: "Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them, in order that the reader may see what they are made of." I'm not saying Katniss and the others don't suffer at all. But in all honesty I don't think she, Flora 717 or any of the new-wave heroes would last very long in Room 101.
4. Some curious omissions The Panem society, the Divergent scenario and many of the above settings, for all their fascist trappings, are surprisingly feminist. It's as if the overlords took a few years out of their plan to conquer and enslave the poor, in order to achieve total gender equality, apparently with minimum effort. Well done, dystopian leaders! Once again, "The Bees" is a notable exception.
So I propose to write a dystopia about a teenage girl growing up in a society where everyone is forced to read dystopian fiction from birth, who starts to suspect that, beyond the mysterious wall of dystopian books there might be some other mysterious reality, and who must pluck up the courage to lead a revolution so that her kin can enjoy (for example) Scandinavian detective novels. Cheers...
Inspired by this post by msmariah on her blog A Space Blogyssey, here's my own list of survival tips and life lessons from the movies. Hollywood really can teach you everything you need to know...
The game is turn-based and there's no combat. Well, that's not quite true. There is an enemy to discover and there is in fact a way to attack enemy fleets. But mostly, you choose the next planet or star, decide whether to land, whether to drill for resources, whether to meet the local species, whether to take over the abandoned spaceship etc. It plays a lot like a Fighting Fantasy gamebook - I have fond memories of Starship Traveller. It's also really, really hard. This is a survival-themed game - meaning you will die a lot. You can die by running out of hydrogen fuel, oxygen, or iron to patch up your hull, any of which is easy to do.
You stay alive by mining or scooping fuel, oxygen or iron from various worlds - along the way encountering aliens, discovering plans for technology to mod your ship, and experiencing random hazards and events. But as your ship only has limited storage space, and planets only yield a small amount of elements, it's hard to keep up stocks. If you've discovered a mod, you still need to mine the right elements to build it, and then it takes up even more of your hull space.
The map is random, as are many other game features, and when you die it's back to the start with a new map. However, if you're careful you can learn more about the game each time you die, and try out different strategies to survive for longer. As the game progresses, more "important" stars appear on the map, but so far I've only ever made it to one of them without dying. This is an extremely difficult game but one I've enjoyed exploring.
An unusual star system containing five stars has been found by the WASP astronomy project, as reported on the BBC News website here. Multiple star systems occur in two classic science-fiction works. Isaac Asimov's novella Nightfall is set on a world with six suns - as a result night falls only once every few thousand years. Liu Cixin's novel The Three Body Problem, translated from the original Chinese, features a virtual world with three suns in irregular and unpredictable orbits.
Both stories explore the impact of these star systems on the civilizations below - in Nightfall, the inhabitants cannot detect stars beyond their system so cannot grasp the size or nature of the Universe, and they have a deep-rooted fear of the dark. The aliens on Liu Cixin's world also struggle to make sense of the Universe, and are striving to find a way to predict their suns' movements so they can prepare for the deadly hot or cold spells that occur when the suns get too close or too far away.
Emily Berrington as Niska
Greeta is a Northlander, a Viking living amongst Native Americans. The Shining Star Nation has welcomed Greeta and her people into their midst but acceptance is not universal, and suspicions and superstitions remain. Without warning, Greeta is rejected by her tribe and discovers that her own family has concealed an important truth about her identity.
Gone is the first book in Michael Grant's popular series of novels for young adults, set in a present-day world without adults. While the novel explores this scenario, introduces Sam and his companions and other less likeable children, and sets up a long list of mysteries to be revealed later in the series, it also explores some satisfyingly heavy themes. It's been written into international law that all YA fiction must be about social inequality, and Gone is no exception, but as it's set in the present day, the social tensions are perfectly familiar: attitudes towards immigrants, religious intolerance and the gap between rich and poor parts of town, rather than futuristic factions or districts.
Some great news: "Steampunk Girl" is on the official selection for London Independent Film Festival 2015! This will be my second LIFF screening (the first was "2007" shown at LIFF 2012) and I'm really looking forward to being back. I'll post details of the screening and festival programme as soon as they become available.
Laline Paull's novel follows in a great tradition of anthropomorphization - Animal Farm, Watership Down. There are one or two flights of fancy - the chambers of the beehive have doors and scent-coded floor panels, the police have visors and gauntlets, and the bees have a jet engine in their abdomen. This last might be a reference to the old idea of scientists being convinced that bees could not fly - but as we all know, the 2005 Altshuler study (abstract here) put that one to rest. I mean, it's always seemed obvious to me that unsteady forces during stroke reversal would make a large contribution to net upward force during hovering, but then what do I know? I'm just a drone...
I had fairly negative expectations of The Interview having read some not-so-great reviews. It also appears Kim Jong-Un himself isn't a fan, so maybe we aren't so different after all. I haven't spoken to him recently but I would guess that he took issue with the contrived plot most of all. Celebrity interviewer Dave Skylark (James Franco) and his producer Aaron Rapaport (Seth Rogen) discover Jong-Un is a fan of their show, so use this as leverage to arrange a once-in-a-lifetime interview, then the CIA crashes their party and asks them to kill him.
Military scientist McCarthy's (Toby Stephens) research into artificial brain implants is not going entirely to plan - recovered bionic soldiers become inexplicably mute a few weeks after surgery, and one experiment goes on a killing spree. To save his scientific bacon, McCarthy recruits quantum computer expert Ava (Caity Lotz) and together they work towards the creation of an android which, for dramatic or possibly budgetary reasons, bears a striking resemblance to Caity Lotz.
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