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Tuesday Top Five: "Another shocking glimpse into our scary spooky no-good future..."
I’ve been thinking about fictional depictions of Grim Futures lately, for absolutely no reason at all, why do you ask? Here are five pieces of dystopian fiction that made an impression on me when I was younger (long before The Hunger Games or the subsequent “YA dystopia boom”).
1. House of Stairs (1974) by William Sleator
Peter, Lola, Blossom, Abigail and Oliver – all sixteen-year-old orphans – wake up without warning in a bizarre environment: stairs extending in every direction but seemingly leading nowhere. A machine distributes food to the group, initially at random, and they must learn to appease it for their own survival… possibly at the cost of their humanity.
For such a short book, House of Stairs does an outstanding job of establishing the stakes, the characters, and the horrifying physical, psychological, emotional extremes to which they’re pushed. (My biggest complaint in retrospect is that the narrative continuously singles out Blossom, a fat girl, as grotesque because of her size.) The epilogue explains how and why the group ended up in that strange situation to begin with, and adds an element of hope and complexity to what could have been a straightforward message of “people inevitably turn into monsters in extreme survival situations” without undermining the horror of what’s been done to these kids.
2. Invitation To The Game (1990) by Monica Hughes
In the year 2154, Lisse and her friends graduate high school to find out that the use of robots has rendered all of their potential jobs obsolete. The government provides them with some basic financial support but drastically limits their movements. While learning to fend for themselves and navigate the neighborhood to which they’ve been confined, the group learns about the Game, a shared virtual reality experience that transports them to a natural wilderness which requires a different kind of ingenuity.
I’m pretty sure that many of the attempts at social and political commentary went over my head as a privileged tween. I’m not sure what I’d think of them now, other than to recognize that Hughes was not entirely off base in her vision of a society that doesn’t offer its young people any sort of meaningful future. When I first read Invitation, my main complaints were that it was really hard to tell most of the ten housemates/Game participants apart, that we didn’t learn more about what being “brain-changed by the thought police” involved (because I have pretty much always been Like This), and that the time-skip at the end felt tacked-on. But the book definitely scratched both my science-fiction itch and my characters-surviving-in-the-woods itch (raise your hand if you also enjoyed reading about the latter even if you would never want to try to survive in the woods in real life).
3. The Giver (1993) by Lois Lowry
Like all of the youth in his strictly controlled community – where war and pain don’t exist – Jonas is prepared to be assigned a career once he turns twelve. Instead, he is selected to become the next Receiver of Memory, and to learn about the world before and outside the “Sameness” to which he’s grown accustomed.
The Giver is probably the most famous of the books on this list, at least among American readers: it won the prestigious Newbery Medal, it’s frequently been taught in schools, and (as far as I know) it’s the only one of the five that’s been adapted for the screen. Unfortunately, I haven’t heard very good things about the movie: apparently it ages up the characters, adds a lot of futuristic technology and other sci-fi thriller elements to fit the 2010s “YA dystopia” mold better, and completely ignores most if not all of what makes the book work. Lowry’s narration drops the reader seamlessly into the story, and while it’s not hard to figure out that Jonas’s world is not like our own, his perspective as somebody who’s never known anything else is very convincing, and some of his childhood concerns, like friendships and family expectations, are recognizable enough to invite sympathy from young readers. His slow realization of what humanity has sacrificed for this supposedly perfect world is relatively quiet and internal, so I understand that adapting that journey for a visual medium would be challenging, but I still don’t think that adding hoverboards was a great idea.
I haven’t read the companion novels, but I’ve heard enough about them to be at least a little bit intrigued.
4. Galax-Arena (1995) by Gillian Rubinstein
In a grim 21st-century Australia, Joella and her siblings are kidnapped by a charismatic stranger named Hythe, who tells them that they’re bound for a planet called Vexak and will be expected to perform athletic feats for an alien audience.
Don’t look up this book if you don’t want to find out the twist, which I still think is very well done. I certainly didn’t expect it when I first read it in high school. Rubinstein also clearly put a lot of thought into the group dynamics among the “peb” (the young captives of the Galax-Arena), and their responses to their traumatic situation. And Hythe, with an affable veneer barely covering his cruelty, is a pretty great villain.
The book ends on a cliff-hanger, and I have yet to read the sequel, Terra-Farma, which isn’t widely available in the United States and which I only found out existed a couple of years ago, even though it was published in 2001. (Teenage Nevanna mostly used the Internet to read fanfiction and was, ironically, very reluctant to ask librarians for help finding books.)
5. Shade’s Children (1997) by Garth Nix
Four teenagers with special abilities escape a horrible fate – the harvesting of their brains, organs, and other parts of their anatomy as raw material for the government’s constructs – that awaits all children in their post-apocalyptic world. They are sheltered by and carry out tasks for Shade, the uploaded AI consciousness of a long-dead scientist, who appears to care for them but also has his own agenda.
Of the five books on my list, this is the one I remember in the least amount of detail, despite the focus on psychic kids and their morally ambiguous mentor. I appreciated – and still appreciate – that the leader of the squad was a girl, and the opening passage from her point of view is incredible. And I recalled enough of the basic story beats to have some pretty interesting conversations about them with a friend of mine whose academic writing includes a great deal of discussion about dystopian fiction in general and this book in particular.
Have you read any of these books? Did any fictional visions of a Grim Future make an impression on you when you were younger?
1. House of Stairs (1974) by William Sleator
Peter, Lola, Blossom, Abigail and Oliver – all sixteen-year-old orphans – wake up without warning in a bizarre environment: stairs extending in every direction but seemingly leading nowhere. A machine distributes food to the group, initially at random, and they must learn to appease it for their own survival… possibly at the cost of their humanity.
For such a short book, House of Stairs does an outstanding job of establishing the stakes, the characters, and the horrifying physical, psychological, emotional extremes to which they’re pushed. (My biggest complaint in retrospect is that the narrative continuously singles out Blossom, a fat girl, as grotesque because of her size.) The epilogue explains how and why the group ended up in that strange situation to begin with, and adds an element of hope and complexity to what could have been a straightforward message of “people inevitably turn into monsters in extreme survival situations” without undermining the horror of what’s been done to these kids.
2. Invitation To The Game (1990) by Monica Hughes
In the year 2154, Lisse and her friends graduate high school to find out that the use of robots has rendered all of their potential jobs obsolete. The government provides them with some basic financial support but drastically limits their movements. While learning to fend for themselves and navigate the neighborhood to which they’ve been confined, the group learns about the Game, a shared virtual reality experience that transports them to a natural wilderness which requires a different kind of ingenuity.
I’m pretty sure that many of the attempts at social and political commentary went over my head as a privileged tween. I’m not sure what I’d think of them now, other than to recognize that Hughes was not entirely off base in her vision of a society that doesn’t offer its young people any sort of meaningful future. When I first read Invitation, my main complaints were that it was really hard to tell most of the ten housemates/Game participants apart, that we didn’t learn more about what being “brain-changed by the thought police” involved (because I have pretty much always been Like This), and that the time-skip at the end felt tacked-on. But the book definitely scratched both my science-fiction itch and my characters-surviving-in-the-woods itch (raise your hand if you also enjoyed reading about the latter even if you would never want to try to survive in the woods in real life).
3. The Giver (1993) by Lois Lowry
Like all of the youth in his strictly controlled community – where war and pain don’t exist – Jonas is prepared to be assigned a career once he turns twelve. Instead, he is selected to become the next Receiver of Memory, and to learn about the world before and outside the “Sameness” to which he’s grown accustomed.
The Giver is probably the most famous of the books on this list, at least among American readers: it won the prestigious Newbery Medal, it’s frequently been taught in schools, and (as far as I know) it’s the only one of the five that’s been adapted for the screen. Unfortunately, I haven’t heard very good things about the movie: apparently it ages up the characters, adds a lot of futuristic technology and other sci-fi thriller elements to fit the 2010s “YA dystopia” mold better, and completely ignores most if not all of what makes the book work. Lowry’s narration drops the reader seamlessly into the story, and while it’s not hard to figure out that Jonas’s world is not like our own, his perspective as somebody who’s never known anything else is very convincing, and some of his childhood concerns, like friendships and family expectations, are recognizable enough to invite sympathy from young readers. His slow realization of what humanity has sacrificed for this supposedly perfect world is relatively quiet and internal, so I understand that adapting that journey for a visual medium would be challenging, but I still don’t think that adding hoverboards was a great idea.
I haven’t read the companion novels, but I’ve heard enough about them to be at least a little bit intrigued.
4. Galax-Arena (1995) by Gillian Rubinstein
In a grim 21st-century Australia, Joella and her siblings are kidnapped by a charismatic stranger named Hythe, who tells them that they’re bound for a planet called Vexak and will be expected to perform athletic feats for an alien audience.
Don’t look up this book if you don’t want to find out the twist, which I still think is very well done. I certainly didn’t expect it when I first read it in high school. Rubinstein also clearly put a lot of thought into the group dynamics among the “peb” (the young captives of the Galax-Arena), and their responses to their traumatic situation. And Hythe, with an affable veneer barely covering his cruelty, is a pretty great villain.
The book ends on a cliff-hanger, and I have yet to read the sequel, Terra-Farma, which isn’t widely available in the United States and which I only found out existed a couple of years ago, even though it was published in 2001. (Teenage Nevanna mostly used the Internet to read fanfiction and was, ironically, very reluctant to ask librarians for help finding books.)
5. Shade’s Children (1997) by Garth Nix
Four teenagers with special abilities escape a horrible fate – the harvesting of their brains, organs, and other parts of their anatomy as raw material for the government’s constructs – that awaits all children in their post-apocalyptic world. They are sheltered by and carry out tasks for Shade, the uploaded AI consciousness of a long-dead scientist, who appears to care for them but also has his own agenda.
Of the five books on my list, this is the one I remember in the least amount of detail, despite the focus on psychic kids and their morally ambiguous mentor. I appreciated – and still appreciate – that the leader of the squad was a girl, and the opening passage from her point of view is incredible. And I recalled enough of the basic story beats to have some pretty interesting conversations about them with a friend of mine whose academic writing includes a great deal of discussion about dystopian fiction in general and this book in particular.
Have you read any of these books? Did any fictional visions of a Grim Future make an impression on you when you were younger?
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