10 Lessons Dystopias Ignore

Oh, YA dystopia. We barely knew ye. I'm sure there were some good stories hidden beneath the two billion retellings of "The Hunger Games" and "Divergent", but we'll never really know because the genre has been beaten to a dead, bloodied, dismembered and barely recognizable pulp.

e: okay Delirium was good.

e2: also Legend.

Just for once, I want a dystopian to end up with the plucky rebels overthrowing the bad government only to end up with a worse one. That seems to be the common occurrence with revolutions in the non-fictional world.

The Hunger Games started to do this with Alma Coin being shown to be as bad as Snow, but it was resolved way too quickly. In fact, that's my biggest complaint about the Hunger Games trilogy: how quickly everything was resolved. It's like, "We killed the bad guy now everything's great and there's no lingering forces loyal to the previous regime or anything like that to deal with."

Personally that one reason I don't even find the term dystopia even useful even more. Cyberpunk is still useful, if it's brought back to it's roots and not, absorbed back into regular SF it was originally intended to subvert. But already sort of beat that to death.

I have my own reasons I don't trust io9 very much. For example disagreeing with everything that doesn't constitute hard SF.

#4 is probably the one that grinds my gears the most.

Not a huge fan of io9, but this article summed up how I feel about 99% of the YA dystopias currently on the market.

Most of them are too simplistic, and give the excuse somewhere down the line of 'Oh, I'm writing for kids, so they can't handle anything too complex.' Which is bullcrap.

After one of my teen cousins finally made the sheepish observation that she didn't like 'Divergent' in either book or movie form, I got her all of Pratchett's 'Tiffany Aching' books. Now I have a much happier cousin.

But they kind of have to ignore those in order to tell the story, don't they? In real life a revolution can throw a country into chaos for decades, but if that was the end of the book I'd feel like the whole thing was pointless.

It's one of those things where reality is unrealistic, I think.

Wasn't Brandon Sanderson's debut a post failed-rebellion story?

I think there can be balance between boring-but-important UN/CSPAN coverage and the typical truncated settings of modern YA dystopia.

Filigree said:

I think there can be balance between boring-but-important UN/CSPAN coverage and the typical truncated settings of modern YA dystopia.

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I've been hoping for one, but all the ones I've seen are 200k+ words...

Filigree said:

Wasn't Brandon Sanderson's debut a post failed-rebellion story?

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No, that was Mistborn, which was not his debut novel. (And also not YA.)

Isn't that kind of why historical novels can sometimes be a bit long though? I could only imagine how long one set in France in the revolutionary era would be.

Samsonet said:

I've been hoping for one, but all the ones I've seen are 200k+ words...

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Yea...I wouldn't read 200K* YA if you paid me to do it, dystopian or not. I think the way to do this without making the wordcount ridiculous, would be to have the MC become the latest in a line of leaders who have lead whatever rebellion is centerstage for the story.

*this doesn't count Harry Potter & the order of the pheonix. I love the book despite thinking 50K could have been cut without problem.

All of these lessons make stories deeper, more interesting, and more "stand out" ey against the wave of imitators.

People should use them!

I think you could write a good YA dystopia that worked more with reality. However, it'd be difficult, and you'd have to approach the story differently than most YA authors do. It would probably require more world-building, it would likely be longer unless you broke it into more than just a trilogy. A standalone would be doable, but very hard in the current market, I'd imagine.


I personally would love to see one. Throw in some fun rebel faction intrigue, drop a love triangle on it. Differing political philosophies could make for some great romantic tension, especially if the intro to the relationship cum alliance, for example. If you think going the love triangle route would help improve the chances.

It's weird, they're forgetting an extremely important thing that YA dystopias seem to have completely ignored:

#0: Dystopian literature does not have to include militarized rebellion at all

Hapax Legomenon said:

It's weird, they're forgetting an extremely important thing that YA dystopias seem to have completely ignored:

#0: Dystopian literature does not have to include militarized rebellion at all

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Hey, my psuedo-dystopia is resolved through internal reforms!

...and magic.

Hapax Legomenon said:

It's weird, they're forgetting an extremely important thing that YA dystopias seem to have completely ignored:

#0: Dystopian literature does not have to include militarized rebellion at all

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This also.

Hapax Legomenon said:

It's weird, they're forgetting an extremely important thing that YA dystopias seem to have completely ignored:

#0: Dystopian literature does not have to include militarized rebellion at all

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true, it could be a social rebellion that catches on.

Oh, one book that does that would be Little Brother!

Zoombie said:

Oh, one book that does that would be Little Brother!

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The writing could have been better, but the story was great.

Emermouse said:

Just for once, I want a dystopian to end up with the plucky rebels overthrowing the bad government only to end up with a worse one. That seems to be the common occurrence with revolutions in the non-fictional world.

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The problem isn't simplification, though, is it? It's that the stories end at that honeymoon moment when the overthrow is complete. It's kind of a natural denouement, isn't it?

Frankly, I'm hoping the upcoming Star Wars movies deal with this. But I'm not expecting that.

Lillith1991 said:

true, it could be a social rebellion that catches on.

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Or the character could only do some small act of rebellion on their own. And even that could end up as a failure and backfiring horribly. Or, maybe, they don't even rebel at all. Who would have thought.

Hapax Legomenon said:

Or the character could only do some small act of rebellion on their own. And even that could end up as a failure and backfiring horribly. Or, maybe, they don't even rebel at all. Who would have thought.

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There's 1984, which isn't a rebellion book - though, it does fake you out at the middle.

Though, actually, now that I think about it, my psuedo-dystopia also has the whole "people pine for the dystopia after it is gone" in the third book and that the revolution doesn't change some things and all sorts of other things in this list.

Am I genius? Or is Io9 reading my thoughts?

Both!

Zoombie said:

There's 1984, which isn't a rebellion book - though, it does fake you out at the middle.

Though, actually, now that I think about it, my psuedo-dystopia also has the whole "people pine for the dystopia after it is gone" in the third book and that the revolution doesn't change some things and all sorts of other things in this list.

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Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy does this also.

I'd be happy if the dystopia didn't hang on some odd premise, especially if they're supposed to take place in the near future. For example, "humans can be owned as pets" or "emotions have been banned..." Uhm, how did that legislation get passed? If you have a premise like that, you're going to have to work harder to make me believe in it. I'm at the point where I think "What next? A dystopia where no one is allowed to keep kittens? A dystopia where candy has been outlawed?" (The candy one might make a great MG dystopia... )

I also could do without the dystopias where everything is the fault of Evil Scientists, and these Evil Scientists are now trying to kill our noble youths because apparently human experimentation on random children is the only way to cure the plague they unleashed... Ugh. Have these writers every met a real scientist? Have they cracked open a Scientific American, let alone an issue of Science or Nature?

I realize that many YA dystopias are really adventure stories or romantic triangles or allegories or whatever. But even an adventure in a dystopian package shouldn't make me roll my eyes so far back in my head that I can see the back of my chair.