Once upon a time, back when triceratops stomped small ponds into the ground as they walked across the earth, I was a teenager. My mother made sure that we went to the library every week (it's possible the dinosaurs were imaginary--I remember riding in the back of our enormously long Chevy Caprice, which ran on liquidized dinosaur fossils) and I often scoured the small science fiction and fantasy section, looking for something I hadn't already read that would catch my interest. I made the mistake of picking up an Octavia Butler once--not that Butler isn't a fantastic writer, but her vision of a dystopian future gave me nightmares for days.
So, a few years later (a decade), I reluctantly picked up The Hunger Games on the recommendation of a very well-read friend. It did not disappoint, but I didn't really enjoy it, either. Let's face it--dystopian fiction can be bleak and humorless. In the years since, we've had Uglies, The Selection, Matched, True Calling, and more that I can't remember off the top of my head. But they meet a certain formula--the original government has been overthrown or destroyed, usually through a cataclysmic event or war or act of terror, and the replacement government controls every aspect of life for the greater good (Hello to the reasons my politics are conservative/moderate--I'm all about the less government model. Anyway...). The gap between the rich and the poor is vast and unbalanced, and another revolution is coming, in which our intrepid heroine rises through the ranks to change the minds of the leaders through her unwillingness to bow to the status quo. Also, there is a love interest.
Formulaic. It works, obviously, since people have been buying and reading and talking about these books for years, but still. It's algebra--plug the right things into the right part of the equation and presto! You have a dystopian novel.
But what about The Giver, you say? Male protagonist! A breath of fresh air! Brilliant writing! Complex without being overly weighty! Yes, The Giver is all of that, but I am so disenchanted with the bleakness that is dystopian fiction that I haven't got the energy to give the rest of the series a try. Ender's Game? Oh wait, another male protag. Apparently the formula gets more flexible if the lead is male. Interesting, right? It works, but Ender's Game strays into science fiction the further you go, running away from dystopia into something new.
I have found a small niche of dystopian fiction that I've somewhat enjoyed, and I'm waiting for the writing to get better. I read The Misfits, a dystopian work that was set so far into the future that the echoes of the catastrophe were barely felt, but the remaining inhabitants were just beginning to make forays into creating a brand new world WITHOUT the suffocating government. And I just finished The Scourge over the holidays. That was almost delightful, and it really was a breath of fresh air. The fact that the society is dystopian is gradually revealed over the course of the story, but the focus is on the survivors and the limits they placed on themselves. Also, there are zombies. Normally I would avoid zombies, but in here, they *worked*.
So, dear readers, if you've stuck with me this far, here's the question: Are there more dystopian works out there, ones that do NOT involve overthrowing the oppressive upstart government? If so, do you enjoy them, and why?
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