Jenna Zucha

Young adult literature's shift in popularity from fantasy to dystopia or speculative literature:

Deserving of literary merit or just another "teenage wasteland?"

In response to speculation that the young adult audience could not handle a purely dystopian world, Lois Lowry, the author of The Giver, avowed that “young people handle dystopia everyday: in their lives, their dysfunctional families, and their violence-ridden schools. They watch dystopian television and movies about the real world where firearms bring about explosive conclusions to conflict. Yes, I think they need to see some hope for such a world.” This affirmation along with a recent review of the popular young adult series, The Hunger Games, in The New Yorker led me to investigate the appeal of utopian literature for young readers as well as the potential educational value it might have on the adolescent community. As a high school English teacher I am constantly trying to stay abreast of trends in the young adult genre. I admit that the majority of past trends in YA literature have been less than satisfactory for the seasoned adult reader. I would often find myself stumbling through second-hand plots with love-sick characters that seem to only care about their upcoming math test or their date for the prom. Thankfully the trend has shifted from dry, overly realistic fiction to a more speculative and imaginative realm of fantasy and science fiction. In my quest to identify the motivation behind the shift I was pleased to find, that not only has the content of the genre improved, so has its literary reputation.

The immediate popularity of S.E. Hinton’s hybrid novel The Outsiders may indicate the young reader’s need for something more than the watered-down realistic fiction offered by the genre prior to the 1960s. I describe this novel as a hybrid because it explores the realistic world of teenagers, gangs, and violence while appealing to the romantic element of lost innocence. This is similar to the theme of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), which is not traditionally characterized as a young adult novel. Michael Cart explains in Young Adult Literature: from Romance to Realism, that Salinger’s novel “is a more distinguished work of fiction that, though published for adults, is also a more viable model for the modern young adult novel than is Hinton’s” (27). The Catcher in the Rye addresses adult themes with opportunities for analysis of the human condition while it remains adolescent in tone, attitudes, and choice of narrative incidents. This seems to remain a model for current trends in young adult literature. The young reader of today demands a story in which the characters and incidents are relevant to their own world while simultaneously drudging through issues that were previously off limits. The popularity of Hinton’s novel in 1967 foreshadows later trends in YA literature. The genre has evolved from realism to fantasy, and now has moved into the realm of “speculative fiction,” which is dominated by anti-utopian literature for young adults.

This term “speculative fiction” has continued to appear in my research. It is defined by Orson Scott Card in How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, as a sub-genre “geared toward an audience that wants to spend time in worlds that absolutely are not like the observable world around them” (qtd. in Gallo 121). Themes of speculative fiction include: conflict between good and evil, the struggle to hang on to hope in a harsh world, and the realization of inevitability of death (Muller, Sullivan 72).

The most recent trend in speculative fiction for young adults is the rise of the dystopian novel. This is evident in the popularity of Susan Collins’s series, The Hunger Games, in which teenagers are forced to play the game of survival in a public arena for the entertainment and pacification of the people. Another example would be in Scott Westerfeld’s popular Uglies series in which all sixteen-year-olds undergo surgery to conform to a universal standard of prettiness determined by evolutionary biology. This idea of speculative fiction may offer a truer version of reality than so-called realistic fiction (as portrayed by the young adult authors of the past). Even though these narratives are set in a world far from reality, the issues and struggles’ the protagonist must face are realer than the issues surrounding ,for example, Maureen Daly’s Seventeenth Summer (1940s).

Laura Miller's New Yorker article “Fresh Hell” explores the issues concerning the recent popularity in dystopian literature among young adults, pointing out that “dystopian stories for adults and children have essentially the same purpose—to warn us about the dangers of some current trend. That’s certainly true of books like “1984” and “Brave New World”; they detail the consequences of political authoritarianism and feckless hedonism. This is what will happen if we don’t turn back now, they scold, and scolding makes sense when your readers have a shot at getting their hands on the wheel” (1). This statement points out one of the most important reasons for the study of utopian and dystopian literature among young people. Such stories may offer more than the escapist theory that has been attached to the genre’s previous obsession with fantasy and science fiction.

The rise of utopian and dystopian literature may be serving a greater need for our youth. This “speculative fiction” has fused the ground between fantasy and realism and is allowing the adolescent reader to explore worlds completely different from their own without sacrificing the issues plaguing us all. Kenneth Roemer has a “strong belief that exposure to the types of speculation and critical perspectives found in utopian literature can liberate students from old habits of thought” (394). Perhaps the critics of YA literature need to be liberated from old ways of thought as well.

It is clear that young adults are demanding more from the books they read, and utopian and dystopian literature seems to satisfy the recent need to explore or speculate the human condition within the safety of fiction. I want to continue this research by exploring the specific elements of this new term “speculative fiction.” How has it transformed the genre? And what role does it play in utopian/ dystopian literature for young adults?

Work Cited

Cart, Michael. Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism. Chicago: American Library Association. (2010): 5-10, 101-103. Print

Gallo, Don. “Bold Books for Teenagers: Speculative Fiction: Classroom Must-Reads.” The English Journal. Vol.97, No. 1 (Sep. 2007): 118-122. Web. 15 Jun. 2011.

Miller, Laura. “Fresh Hell.” The New Yorker., 17 June. 2010. Web 15 2011.

Muller, Al. & Sullivan, C.W. “Science Fiction and Fantasy Series Books.” Vol.69, No.7. (Oct., 1980): 70-74. Web. 13 Jun. 2011.

Roemer, Kenneth. “Utopian Literature, Empowering Students, and Gender Awareness.” Science Fiction Studies. Vol. 23, No.3 (Nov., 1996.): 393-405. Web. 15 Jun. 2011.