If you've been up to date with the YA world, you'll notice that the number of dystopian novels has been increasing. From The Hunger Games to the Divergent series, here and there we see popping up out of the bushes stories of post-civilization, where development has gone to the extent of destruction and where humans are forced to forge new rules and new societies out of the ashes we have burned ourselves.
Call it paranoia, call it a misjudgment, but I feel as if there are much more dystopian novels these days than there were, say, three decades ago. If you disagree with me, then hold your thought (or just go on and read something else). Let me ask you: assuming that I am right in my observation, what causes this? What makes so many modern authors feel the compelling desire to write novels about post-civilization settings with rebellious heroes?
Well, here's my take.
Today, we're immersed in what we affectionately call the Information age. The Technology Age. The Era of Major Development. The Age of Internet. Whatever it is, we know that one thing runs in the core of all of these names. It's technology.
In a world like today, it's hard to come by a first-world setting that doesn't use some sort of modern technology--starting from televisions, cell phones, even computers or tablets. Everywhere we go, we see technology, technology, technology. And what's more, these bits of technologies are evolving at an alarmingly fast rate. Year after year we see a new version of the iPhone--a commodity that was, just about a decade ago, a completely far-fetched dream. We see the development of scientific technology, biotechnology. It's not running on the forefront as visibly conspicuous representatives of our era, but many of you have likely heard of bioengineering, robotics, and other areas of that nature. How could people, say, fifty years ago, have known that today, we'd be testing the ability of monkeys to control artificial arms with sheer brainpower? They couldn't have.
And that, in my opinion, is the main engine behind the upsurge of dystopian novel publications. Because along with the goods of technology, there also come the bads. Yeah, it's great that I can find my nearest Shop Rite with my smartphone and get there without getting lost. Yeah, it's great that all of these inventions and machines are getting the job done with a hundred times more efficiency and speed than the average worker. But then comes the question of the humans themselves. What becomes of the low-skill jobs? Of the workers? What becomes of the things that technology replaces? What becomes of nature? What becomes of society, that once valued community and shared values? In another article, I read that our generation is the generation of narcissists. And in some ways, it's very true. It's easy to start something on your own. It's easier to play on your own. It's easier to feel less lonely on your own because you have the Internet--the gateway to practically the whole world now.
So there it is. With the good comes the bad and dystopian novels are the literary products of our innate questionings. What happens if it all goes too far? I'm sure hundreds of years ago, dystopian novels of their sort existed. But with technology zooming towards us at an alarmingly fast rate, the prospect of a doomed civilization seems very much real to us. Are you forgetting about global warming? About alarmingly autonomous and human-like robotics? Much more people today are worried about the effects of development than, likely, people years and years ago. In fact, (and I'm sorry for all of these awfully ambiguous references, but I assure you that they are all reliable) I once saw a graph mapping the development of humanity over the history of the homo sapien, and what surprised me was that the curve of human development over the centuries was not linear nor parabolic (though I'd wonder why it would be parabolic)--it was exponential. The graph of our development, ideological and technological--get this--was exponential. This means that the sum of everything that happened before and through and after the Renaissance was, yes, a lot, but what's happening today is exponentially greater and faster than it has been for the history of our walking, self-aware, critically thinking species.
It only seems logical, therefore, that we are worrying about our futures more than we have been in the past centuries. And of course, what do the artists do? They portray it. They try to enlighten us. They try to play around with words that dance around topics that are close to us today. And of course, one of them is the eerily close idea of the destruction of civilization. It all seems too easy. Too much technology seems to lead to the disintegration of the values of what we have always held as human. And authors such as Suzanne Collins or Veronica Roth spin those ideas into easily readable words for the younger readers interested in popular culture. And it makes sense that way. Technology and destruction. Close enough, right?