A "progressive parent" friend of mine was recently expressing enthusiasm over the fact that his children had taken to reading Young Adult dystopian novels. They were dying to see the new feature film adaptation of the book The Giver, after having ploughed through the quartet of bestselling books by Lois Lowry. They had absorbed the blockbuster film adaptations of Divergent and The Hunger Games and had hungrily consumed the asscociated merchandise . They'd also made hundreds of new friends from all over the world who "shared" the same passion for dystopian teen icons Katniss, Tris and Jonas through the tens of thousands of Twitter fan accounts.
My friend thought teenage dystopian fiction to be a great improvement on the Harry Potter cult that had been filling children's heads with right-wing dreams of public schools and supernatural powers. He felt that YA dystopias were a good way of teaching kids to "question authority" - these books, after all, had protagonists who exposed the lies of their societies, they were standing up against those in power. Dystopian YA was, he claimed, a great left-wing educational tool. My friend could not have been more wrong.
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via Science fiction | The Guardian http://ift.tt/1u8lkBO
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