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By Ray Bradbury

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by Anthony Lentini

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When I first started teaching dystopian literature about a dozen years ago, I actually had to define dystopia. Not any more! Kids love the stuff, and they already have a lot of experience. But I still think it's great to teach because you can dig into some of the more nuanced ideas and even some aspects of literary style or sentence construction.

One thing I like to do is start with the idea of Utopia, since most Dystopias come about because a powerful group tries to create an ideal society for themselves. Utopian songs are a nice way to start because they're short and students usually enjoy listening to them. Many of these Utopian songs would work on their own, or you could also do a jigsaw or have groups listen to several and compare/contrast.

1. Big Rock Candy Mountain by Harry McClintock-My favorite Utopian song to teach. Some kids will probably need historical background (this video works well). Good for inference and point of view. Clearly introduces the idea that one person's Utopia might cause problems for others. Warning: does have references to alcohol and theft.

2. (Nothing but) Flowers by The Talking Heads-So The Talking Heads are rarely straightforward, right? And this ironic song is probably as much Dystopian as it is Utopian. But it is an accessible way of exploring how authors comment on our own world through the imagined worlds of Utopias and Dystopias.

Stay tuned to Next Time Teaching because Dystopian literature is one of my favorite things to teach and there's lots more coming!

This entry was posted in paired passages on by .

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8 Utopian Songs for Your Dystopian Unit - NEXT TIME TEACHING

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When I first started teaching dystopian literature about a dozen years ago, I actually had to define dystopia. Not any more! Kids love the stuff, and they already have a lot of experience. But I still think it's great to teach because you can dig into some of the more nuanced ideas and even some [...]

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by Henry Slesar

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CommonLit | Examination Day- Short Story by Henry Slesar: Questions & Answers

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Henry Slesar's 'Examination Day' is a short science fiction story in which the government requires a boy take an intelligence exam once he turns 12 years old.

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By Kij Johnson

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The invitation card has a Western theme. Along its margins, cartoon girls in cowboy hats chase a herd of wild Ponies. The Ponies are no taller than the girls, bright as butterflies, fat, with short round-tipped unicorn horns and small fluffy wings. At the bottom of the card, newly caught Ponies mill about in a corral. The girls have lassoed a pink-and-white Pony. Its eyes and mouth are surprised round Os. There is an exclamation mark over its head.

The little girls are cutting off its horn with curved knives. Its wings are already removed, part of a pile beside the corral.

You and your Pony ___[and Sunny's name is handwritten here, in puffy letters]___ are invited to a cutting-out party with TheOtherGirls! If we like you, and if your Pony does okay, we'll let you hang out with us.

Sunny says, "I can't wait to have friends!" She reads over Barbara's shoulder, rose-scented breath woofling through Barbara's hair. They are in the backyard next to Sunny's pink stable.

Barbara says, "Do you know what you want to keep?"

Sunny's tiny wings are a blur as she hops into the air, loops, and then hovers, legs curled under her. "Oh, being able to talk, absolutely! Flying is great, but talking is way better!" She drops to the grass. "I don't know why any Pony would keep her horn! It's not like it does anything!"

This is the way it's always been, as long as there have been Ponies. All ponies have wings. All Ponies have horns. All Ponies can talk. Then all Ponies go to a cutting-out party, and they give up two of the three, because that's what has to happen if a girl is going to fit in with TheOtherGirls. Barbara's never seen a Pony that still had her horn or wings after her cutting-out party.

Barbara sees TheOtherGirls' Ponies peeking in the classroom windows just before recess or clustered at the bus stop after school. They're baby pink and lavender and daffodil-yellow, with flossy manes in ringlets, and tails that curl to the ground. When not at school and cello lessons and ballet class and soccer practice and play group and the orthodontist's, TheOtherGirls spend their days with their Ponies.

***

The party is at TopGirl's house. She has a mother who's a pediatrician and a father who's a cardiologist and a small barn and giant trees shading the grass where the Ponies are playing games. Sunny walks out to them nervously. They silently touch her horn and wings with their velvet noses, and then the Ponies all trot out to the lilac barn at the bottom of the pasture, where a bale of hay has been broken open.

TopGirl meets Barbara at the fence. "That's your Pony?" she says without greeting. "She's not as pretty as Starblossom."

Barbara is defensive. "She's beautiful!" This is a misstep so she adds, "Yours is so pretty!" And TopGirl's Pony is pretty: her tail is every shade of purple and glitters with stars. But Sunny's tail is creamy white and shines with honey-colored light, and Barbara knows that Sunny's the most beautiful Pony ever.

TopGirl walks away, saying over her shoulder, "There's Rock Band in the family room and a bunch of TheOtherGirls are hanging out on the deck and Mom bought some cookies and there's Coke Zero and diet Red Bull and diet lemonade."

"Where are you?" Barbara asks.

" I'm outside," TopGirl says, so Barbara gets a Crystal Light and three frosted raisin-oatmeal cookies and follows her. TheOtherGirls outside are listening to an iPod plugged into speakers and playing Wii tennis and watching the Ponies play HideAndSeek and Who'sPrettiest and ThisIsTheBestGame. They are all there, SecondGirl and SuckUpGirl and EveryoneLikesHerGirl and the rest. Barbara only speaks when she thinks she'll get it right.

And then it's time. TheOtherGirls and their silent Ponies collect in a ring around Barbara and Sunny. Barbara feels sick.

TopGirl says to Barbara, "What did she pick?"

Sunny looks scared but answers her directly. "I would rather talk than fly or stab things with my horn."

TopGirl says to Barbara, "That's what Ponies always say." She gives Barbara a curved knife with a blade as long as a woman's hand.

"Me?" Barbara says. "I thought someone else did it. A grown-up."

TopGirl says, "Everyone does it for their own Pony. I did it for Starblossom."

In silence Sunny stretches out a wing.

It's not the way it would be, cutting a real pony. The wing comes off easily, smooth as plastic, and the blood smells like cotton candy at the fair. There's a shiny trembling oval where the wing was, as if Barbara is cutting rose-flavored Turkish Delight in half and sees the pink under the powdered sugar. She thinks, It's sort of pretty, and throws up.

Sunny shivers, her eyes shut tight. Barbara cuts off the second wing and lays it beside the first.

The horn is harder, like paring a real pony's hooves. Barbara's hand slips and she cuts Sunny, and there's more cotton-candy blood. And then the horn lies in the grass beside the wings.

Sunny drops to her knees. Barbara throws the knife down and falls beside her, sobbing and hiccuping. She scrubs her face with the back of her hand and looks up at the circle.

Starblossom touches the knife with her nose, pushes it toward Barbara with one lilac hoof. TopGirl says, "Now the voice. You have to take away her voice."

"But I already cut off her wings and her horn!" Barbara throws her arms around Sunny's neck, protecting it. "Two of the three, you said!"

"That's the cutting-out, yeah," TopGirl says. "That's what you do to be OneOfUs. But the Ponies pick their own friends. And that costs, too." Starblossom tosses her violet mane. For the first time, Barbara sees that there is a scar shaped like a smile on her throat. All the Ponies have one.

"I won't!" Barbara tells them all, but even as she cries until her face is caked with snot and tears, she knows she will, and when she's done crying, she picks up the knife and pulls herself upright.

Sunny stands up beside her on trembling legs. She looks very small without her horn, her wings. Barbara's hands are slippery, but she tightens her grip.

"No," Sunny says suddenly. "Not even for this."

Sunny spins and runs, runs for the fence in a gallop as fast and beautiful as a real pony's; but there are more of the others, and they are bigger, and Sunny doesn't have her wings to fly or her horn to fight. They pull her down before she can jump the fence into the woods beyond. Sunny cries out and then there is nothing, only the sound of pounding hooves from the tight circle of Ponies.

TheOtherGirls stand, frozen. Their blind faces are turned toward the Ponies.

The Ponies break their circle, trot away. There is no sign of Sunny, beyond a spray of cotton-candy blood and a coil of her glowing mane torn free and fading as it falls to the grass.

Into the silence TopGirl says, "Cookies?" She sounds fragile and false. TheOtherGirls crowd into the house, chattering in equally artificial voices. They start up a game, drink more Diet Coke.

Barbara stumbles after them into the family room. "What are you playing?" she says, uncertainly.

"Why are you here?" FirstGirl says, as if noticing her for the first time. "You're not OneOfUs."

TheOtherGirls nod. "You don't have a pony."
Copyright © 2010 by Kij Johnson

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If you want to be friends with The Other Girls, you're going to have to give something up; this is the way it's always been, as long as there have been Ponies.

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Dystopian Units Usually...

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by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

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By Ray Bradbury

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By Bruce Holland Rogers

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By Shirley Jackson

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By Ray Bradbury

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"August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains" by Ray Bradbury

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To Read Dystopia, Thinking About the World

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To Read Dystopia, Thinking About the World

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The world is virtual. The danger is real.

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Could use as a gallery walk or intro to the unit.

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Machina | Dystopian Animated Short Film (2020)

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"Model Citizen" | Dystopian Animated Short Film (2020)

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Essential Questions for dystopian reading:

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Someone Might Be Watching: An Introduction to Dystopian Fiction 

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Someone Might Be Watching: An Introduction to Dystopian Fiction 

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CommonLit | Dystopian Fiction Novels: Characteristics & Examples

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Dystopian fiction novels are commonplace in our society today. Read this text to learn about the characteristics of the genre and examples in literature.

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Why Teens Find the End of the World so Appealing 

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Why Teens Find the End of the World so Appealing 

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CommonLit | Why Teens Find The End Of The World So Appealing

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Dystopian fiction has become an extremely popular genre amongst teenagers. This genre usually focuses on a world where life is unpleasant or bad because of certain social or political structures.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Holzberger- Dystopian Unit Google Slides 

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Dystopian Fiction Seems Pretty Real, and That's Why Teens Like it  

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Dystopian Fiction Seems Pretty Real, and That's Why Teens Like it  

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This piece originally ran in 2017.
The plots of dystopian novels can be amazing. A group of teens in Holland, Mich., tells me about some of their favorites:

In Delirium by Lauren Oliver, Love is considered a disease. Characters get a vaccine for it. In Marissa Meyer's Renegades, the collapse of society has left only a small group of humans with extraordinary abilities. They work to establish justice and peace in their new world.

Scott Westerfeld's Uglies is on everyone's favorite list. The plot goes like this: Everyone wants to be pretty. For their 16th birthday, they can be surgically altered to be a "pretty." During the surgery, however, lesions are put on their brains. These can cause illness, or hinder thinking. If characters get an important enough job later on, they get those lesions removed.

The teens explaining these books are sitting around a table at the public library in Holland, an idyllic west Michigan town. This time, the book club is meeting to talk about The House of The Scorpion by Nancy Farmer - the gathering is part of the library's young adult programming.

Even though the flyer advertises this book as dystopian, there's some dissent around that (at a dystopian book club, this distrust of "the adults and their flyers" is no surprise.)

After a brief plot description (there's a drug lord, clones and, of course, a rebellion against the status quo), Taylor Gort, 17, starts things off: "It's a question of how many ethics rules are you willing to break," she says, referring to the book's main character, El Patrón. Amanda Heidema, the librarian leading the discussion, nods her head, "I mean, is making a clone ethical?"

There are a few beats of silence before Will Anderson shakes his head: "No, I don't think it is."

The conversation goes on for nearly an hour - flowing from clones, to whether manipulation is evil, to how screwed up adults are ( can you believe they think this book is dystopian? It's not.).

That last one - how messed up grownups are - is a hallmark of dystopia, especially in the young adult genre. When I ask the group why they think these types of books are so popular with teens, they tell me it has a lot to do with relatability.

"There tends to be a common teen-angst thing, like: 'Oh, the whole world is against me, the whole world is so screwed up,' " Will explains. Teenagers are cynical, adds Aaron Yost. And they should be: "To be fair, they were born into a world that their parents kind of really messed up."

Everyone here agrees: The plots in dystopia feel super familiar. That's kind of what makes the books scary - and really good. Think of it like this: Teen readers themselves are characters in a strange land. Rules don't make sense. School doesn't always make sense. And they don't have a ton of power.

"Their parents impose curfews, and no one lets them drive unless they are ready or not," says Jon Ostenson, who studies young adult dystopian literature at Brigham Young University in Utah. He published a paper on the subject in 2013, for which he spent months reading YA dystopia. "I had to take a break for quite a while - unfortunately there's not a lot of utopian fiction to balance that out."

In dystopia, he says, "Teenagers see echoes of a world that they know."

These books don't always have a happy ending, and they're all about choices and consequences.

"The hallmark of moving from childhood to adulthood is that you start to recognize that things aren't black and white," says Ostenson, "and there's a whole bunch of ethical gray area out there."

That makes dystopian fiction perfect for the developing adolescent brain, says Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist at Temple University.

"Their brains are very responsive to emotionally arousing stimuli," he explains. During this time, there are so many new emotions and they are much stronger than those kids experienced when they were younger.

"When teenagers feel sad, what they often do is put themselves in situations where they feel even sadder," Steinberg says. They listen to sad music - think emo! - they watch melodramatic TV shows. So dystopian novels fit right in, they have all that sadness plus big, emotional ideas: justice, fairness, loyalty and mortality.

This time in a kid's life is often defined by acting out, but, Steinberg says, that's a misguided interpretation of what's happening. "It isn't so much rebellion, but it is questioning."

As the brain develops, so does executive functioning. Teens start to understand argument, logical reasoning and hypotheticals.

"Kids are going through a stage in development when they are trying on different identities," he says, "flexing a muscle that they now have that wasn't very strong before."

The fact that these books offer a safety net, a place where kids can "flirt with those kinds of questions without really doing anything that might get them into trouble," that's reason enough to keep teachers and parents buying them.

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For Teens, Dystopian Fiction Seems Pretty Real - And That's Why They Like It

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This piece originally ran in 2017. The plots of dystopian novels can be amazing. A group of teens in Holland, Mich., tells me about some of their favorites: In Delirium by Lauren Oliver, Love is considered a disease. Characters get a vaccine for it.

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Scene from Pixar's Wall-E Demonstrating a Dystopia

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Scene from Pixar's Wall-E Demonstrating a Dystopia

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Here are the plots of some new dystopian novels, set in the near future. The world got too hot, so a wealthy celebrity persuaded a small number of very rich people to move to a makeshift satellite that, from orbit, leaches the last nourishment the earth has to give, leaving everyone else to starve. The people on the satellite have lost their genitals, through some kind of instant mutation or super-quick evolution, but there is a lot of sex anyway, since it's become fashionable to have surgical procedures to give yourself a variety of appendages and openings, along with decorative skin grafts and tattoos, there being so little else to do. There are no children, but the celebrity who rules the satellite has been trying to create them by torturing women from the earth's surface. ("We are what happens when the seemingly unthinkable celebrity rises to power," the novel's narrator says.) Or: North Korea deployed a brain-damaging chemical weapon that made everyone in the United States, or at least everyone in L.A., an idiot, except for a few people who were on a boat the day the scourge came, but the idiots, who are otherwise remarkably sweet, round up and kill those people, out of fear. Led by a man known only as the Chief, the idiots build a wall around downtown to keep out the Drifters and the stupidest people, the Shamblers, who don't know how to tie shoes or button buttons; they wander around, naked and barefoot. Thanks, in part, to the difficulty of clothing, there is a lot of sex, random and unsatisfying, but there are very few children, because no one knows how to take care of them. (The jacket copy bills this novel as "the first book of the Trump era.")

Or: Machines replaced humans, doing all the work and providing all the food, and, even though if you leave the city it is hotter everywhere else, some huffy young people do, because they are so bored, not to mention that they are mad at their parents, who do annoying things like run giant corporations. The runaways are called walkaways. (I gather they're not in a terribly big hurry.) They talk about revolution, take a lot of baths, upload their brains onto computers, and have a lot of sex, but, to be honest, they are very boring. Or: Even after the coasts were lost to the floods when the ice caps melted, the American South, defying a new federal law, refused to give up fossil fuels, and seceded, which led to a civil war, which had been going on for decades, and was about to be over, on Reunification Day, except that a woman from Louisiana who lost her whole family in the war went to the celebration and released a poison that killed a hundred million people, which doesn't seem like the tragedy it might have been, because in this future world, as in all the others, there's not much to live for, what with the petty tyrants, the rotten weather, and the crappy sex. It will not give too much away if I say that none of these novels have a happy ending (though one has a twist). Then again, none of them have a happy beginning, either.

Dystopias follow utopias the way thunder follows lightning. This year, the thunder is roaring. But people are so grumpy, what with the petty tyrants and such, that it's easy to forget how recently lightning struck. "Whether we measure our progress in terms of wiredness, open-mindedness, or optimism, the country is moving in the right direction, and faster, perhaps, than even we would have believed," a reporter for Wired wrote in May, 2000. "We are, as a nation, better educated, more tolerant, and more connected because of-not in spite of-the convergence of the internet and public life. Partisanship, religion, geography, race, gender, and other traditional political divisions are giving way to a new standard-wiredness-as an organizing principle." Nor was the utopianism merely technological, or callow. In January, 2008, Barack Obama gave a speech in New Hampshire, about the American creed:

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: Yes, we can. It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights: Yes, we can. It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness: Yes, we can. . . . Yes, we can heal this nation. Yes, we can repair this world. Yes, we can.

That was the lightning, the flash of hope, the promise of perfectibility. The argument of dystopianism is that perfection comes at the cost of freedom. Every new lament about the end of the republic, every column about the collapse of civilization, every new novel of doom: these are its answering thunder. Rumble, thud, rumble, ka-boom, KA-BOOM!

A utopia is a paradise, a dystopia a paradise lost. Before utopias and dystopias became imagined futures, they were imagined pasts, or imagined places, like the Garden of Eden. "I have found a continent more densely peopled and abounding in animals than our Europe or Asia or Africa, and, in addition, a climate milder and more delightful than in any other region known to us," Amerigo Vespucci wrote, in extravagant letters describing his voyages across the Atlantic, published in 1503 as "Mundus Novus_,"_ a new world. In 1516, Thomas More published a fictional account of a sailor on one of Vespucci's ships who had travelled just a bit farther, to the island of Utopia, where he found a perfect republic. (More coined the term: "utopia" means "nowhere.") "Gulliver's Travels" (1726) is a satire of the utopianism of the Enlightenment. On the island of Laputa, Gulliver visits the Academy of Lagado, where the sages, the first progressives, are busy trying to make pincushions out of marble, breeding naked sheep, and improving the language by getting rid of all the words. The word "dystopia," meaning "an unhappy country," was coined in the seventeen-forties, as the historian Gregory Claeys points out in a shrewd new study, "Dystopia: A Natural History" (Oxford). In its modern definition, a dystopia can be apocalyptic, or post-apocalyptic, or neither, but it has to be anti-utopian, a utopia turned upside down, a world in which people tried to build a republic of perfection only to find that they had created a republic of misery. "A Trip to the Island of Equality," a 1792 reply to Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man," is a dystopia (on the island, the pursuit of equality has reduced everyone to living in caves), but Mary Shelley's 1826 novel, "The Last Man," in which the last human being dies in the year 2100 of a dreadful plague, is not dystopian; it's merely apocalyptic.

The dystopian novel emerged in response to the first utopian novels, like Edward Bellamy's best-selling 1888 fantasy, "Looking Backward," about a socialist utopia in the year 2000. "Looking Backward" was so successful that it produced a dozen anti-socialist, anti-utopian replies, including "Looking Further Backward" (in which China invades the United States, which has been weakened by its embrace of socialism) and "Looking Further Forward" (in which socialism is so unquestionable that a history professor who refutes it is demoted to the rank of janitor). In 1887, a year before Bellamy, the American writer Anna Bowman Dodd published "The Republic of the Future," a socialist dystopia set in New York in 2050, in which women and men are equal, children are reared by the state, machines handle all the work, and most people, having nothing else to do, spend much of their time at the gym, obsessed with fitness. Dodd describes this world as "the very acme of dreariness." What is a dystopia? The gym. (That's still true. In a 2011 episode of "Black Mirror," life on earth in an energy-scarce future has been reduced to an interminable spin class.)

Utopians believe in progress; dystopians don't. They fight this argument out in competing visions of the future, utopians offering promises, dystopians issuing warnings. In 1895, in "The Time Machine," H. G. Wells introduced the remarkably handy device of travelling through time by way of a clock. After that, time travel proved convenient, but even Wells didn't always use a machine. In his 1899 novel, "When the Sleeper Awakes," his hero simply oversleeps his way to the twenty-first century, where he finds a world in which people are enslaved by propaganda, and "helpless in the hands of the demagogue." That's one problem with dystopian fiction: forewarned is not always forearmed.

Sleeping through the warning signs is another problem. "I was asleep before," the heroine of "The Handmaid's Tale" says in the new Hulu production of Margaret Atwood's 1986 novel. "That's how we let it happen." But what about when everyone's awake, and there are plenty of warnings, but no one does anything about them? "NK3," by Michael Tolkin (Atlantic), is an intricate and cleverly constructed account of the aftermath of a North Korean chemical attack; the NK3 of the title has entirely destroyed its victims' memories and has vastly diminished their capacity to reason. This puts the novel's characters in the same position as the readers of all dystopian fiction: they're left to try to piece together not a whodunnit but a howdidithappen. Seth Kaplan, who'd been a pediatric oncologist, pages through periodicals left in a seat back on a Singapore Airlines jet, on the ground at LAX. The periodicals, like the plane, hadn't moved since the plague arrived. "It confused Seth that the plague was front-page news in some but not all of the papers," Tolkin writes. "They still printed reviews of movies and books, articles about new cars, ways to make inexpensive costumes for Halloween." Everyone had been awake, but they'd been busy shopping for cars and picking out movies and cutting eyeholes in paper bags.

This spring's blighted crop of dystopian novels is pessimistic about technology, about the economy, about politics, and about the planet, making it a more abundant harvest of unhappiness than most other heydays of downheartedness. The Internet did not stitch us all together. Economic growth has led to widening economic inequality and a looming environmental crisis. Democracy appears to be yielding to authoritarianism. "Hopes, dashed" is, lately, a long list, and getting longer. The plane is grounded, seat backs in the upright position, and we are dying, slowly, of stupidity.

Pick your present-day dilemma; there's a new dystopian novel to match it. Worried about political polarization? In "American War" (Knopf), Omar El Akkad traces the United States' descent from gridlock to barbarism as the states of the former Confederacy (or, at least, the parts that aren't underwater) refuse to abide by the Sustainable Future Act, and secede in 2074. Troubled by the new Jim Crow? Ben H. Winters's "Underground Airlines" (Little, Brown) is set in an early-twenty-first-century United States in which slavery abides, made crueller, and more inescapable, by the giant, unregulated slave-owning corporations that deploy the surveillance powers of modern technology, so that even escaping to the North (on underground airlines) hardly offers much hope, since free blacks in cities like Chicago live in segregated neighborhoods with no decent housing or schooling or work and it's the very poverty in which they live that defeats arguments for abolition by hardening ideas about race. As the book's narrator, a fugitive slave, explains, "Black gets to mean poor and poor to mean dangerous and all the words get murked together and become one dark idea, a cloud of smoke, the smokestack fumes drifting like filthy air across the rest of the nation."

Radical pessimism is a dismal trend. The despair, this particular publishing season, comes in many forms, including the grotesque. In "The Book of Joan" (Harper), Lidia Yuknavitch's narrator, Christine Pizan, is forty-nine, and about to die, because she's living on a satellite orbiting the earth, where everyone is executed at the age of fifty; the wet in their bodies constitutes the colony's water supply. (Dystopia, here, is menopause.) Her body has aged: "If hormones have any meaning left for any of us, it is latent at best." She examines herself in the mirror: "I have a slight rise where each breast began, and a kind of mound where my pubic bone should be, but that's it. Nothing else of woman is left." Yuknavitch's Pizan is a resurrection of the medieval French scholar and historian Christine de Pisan, who in 1405 wrote the allegorical "Book of the City of Ladies," and, in 1429, "The Song of Joan of Arc," an account of the life of the martyr. In the year 2049, Yuknavitch's Pizan writes on her body, by a torturous process of self-mutilation, the story of a twenty-first-century Joan, who is trying to save the planet from Jean de Men (another historical allusion), the insane celebrity who has become its ruler. In the end, de Men himself is revealed to be "not a man but what is left of a woman," with "all the traces: sad, stitched-up sacks of flesh where breasts had once been, as if someone tried too hard to erase their existence. And a bulbous sagging gash sutured over and over where . . . life had perhaps happened in the past, or not, and worse, several dangling attempts at half-formed penises, sewn and abandoned, distended and limp."

Equal rights for women, emancipation, Reconstruction, civil rights: so many hopes, dashed; so many causes, lost. Pisan pictured a city of women; Lincoln believed in union; King had a dream. Yuknavitch and El Akkad and Winters unspool the reels of those dreams, and recut them as nightmares. This move isn't new, or daring; it is, instead, very old. The question is whether it's all used up, as parched as a post-apocalyptic desert, as barren as an old woman, as addled as an old man.

A utopia is a planned society; planned societies are often disastrous; that's why utopias contain their own dystopias. Most early-twentieth-century dystopian novels took the form of political parables, critiques of planned societies, from both the left and the right. The utopianism of Communists, eugenicists, New Dealers, and Fascists produced the Russian novelist Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We" in 1924, Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" in 1935, Ayn Rand's "Anthem" in 1937, and George Orwell's "1984" in 1949. After the war, after the death camps, after the bomb, dystopian fiction thrived, like a weed that favors shade. "A decreasing percentage of the imaginary worlds are utopias," the literary scholar Chad Walsh observed in 1962. "An increasing percentage are nightmares."

Much postwar pessimism had to do with the superficiality of mass culture in an age of affluence, and with the fear that the banality and conformity of consumer society had reduced people to robots. "I drive my car to supermarket," John Updike wrote in 1954. "The way I take is superhigh, / A superlot is where I park it, / And Super Suds are what I buy." Supersudsy television boosterism is the utopianism attacked by Kurt Vonnegut in "Player Piano" (1952) and by Ray Bradbury in "Fahrenheit 451" (1953). Cold War dystopianism came in as many flavors as soda pop or superheroes and in as many sizes as nuclear warheads. But, in a deeper sense, the mid-century overtaking of utopianism by dystopianism marked the rise of modern conservatism: a rejection of the idea of the liberal state. Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" appeared in 1957, and climbed up the Times best-seller list. It has sold more than eight million copies.

The second half of the twentieth century, of course, also produced liberal-minded dystopias, chiefly concerned with issuing warnings about pollution and climate change, nuclear weapons and corporate monopolies, technological totalitarianism and the fragility of rights secured from the state. There were, for instance, feminist dystopias. The utopianism of the Moral Majority, founded in 1979, lies behind "The Handmaid's Tale" (a book that is, among other things, an updating of Harriet Jacobs's 1861 "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl"). But rights-based dystopianism also led to the creation of a subgenre of dystopian fiction: bleak futures for bobby-soxers. Dystopianism turns out to have a natural affinity with American adolescence. And this, I think, is where the life of the genre got squeezed out, like a beetle burned up on an asphalt driveway by a boy wielding a magnifying glass on a sunny day. It sizzles, and then it smokes, and then it just lies there, dead as a bug.

Dystopias featuring teen-age characters have been a staple of high-school life since "The Lord of the Flies" came out, in 1954. But the genre only really took off in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, when distrust of adult institutions and adult authority flourished, and the publishing industry began producing fiction packaged for "young adults," ages twelve to eighteen. Some of these books are pretty good. M. T. Anderson's 2002 Y.A. novel, "Feed," is a smart and fierce answer to the "Don't Be Evil" utopianism of Google, founded in 1996. All of them are characterized by a withering contempt for adults and by an unshakable suspicion of authority. "The Hunger Games" trilogy, whose first installment appeared in 2008, has to do with economic inequality, but, like all Y.A. dystopian fiction, it's also addressed to readers who feel betrayed by a world that looked so much better to them when they were just a bit younger. "I grew up a little, and I gradually began to figure out that pretty much everyone had been lying to me about pretty much everything," the high-school-age narrator writes at the beginning of Ernest Cline's best-selling 2011 Y.A. novel, "Ready Player One."

Lately, even dystopian fiction marketed to adults has an adolescent sensibility, pouty and hostile. Cory Doctorow's new novel, "Walkaway" (Tor), begins late at night at a party in a derelict factory with a main character named Hubert: "At twenty-seven, he had seven years on the next oldest partier." The story goes on in this way, with Doctorow inviting grownup readers to hang out with adolescents, looking for immortality, while supplying neologisms like "spum" instead of "spam" to remind us that we're in a world that's close to our own, but weird. "My father spies on me," the novel's young heroine complains. "Walkaway" comes with an endorsement from Edward Snowden. Doctorow's earlier novel, a Y.A. book called "Little Brother," told the story of four teen-agers and their fight for Internet privacy rights. With "Walkaway," Doctorow pounds the same nails with the same bludgeon. His walkaways are trying to turn a dystopia into a utopia by writing better computer code than their enemies. "A pod of mercs and an infotech goon pwnd everything using some zeroday they'd bought from scumbag default infowar researchers" is the sort of thing they say. "They took over the drone fleet, and while we dewormed it, seized the mechas."

Every dystopia is a history of the future. What are the consequences of a literature, even a pulp literature, of political desperation? "It's a sad commentary on our age that we find dystopias a lot easier to believe in than utopias," Atwood wrote in the nineteen-eighties. "Utopias we can only imagine; dystopias we've already had." But what was really happening then was that the genre and its readers were sorting themselves out by political preference, following the same path-to the same ideological bunkers-as families, friends, neighborhoods, and the news. In the first year of Obama's Presidency, Americans bought half a million copies of "Atlas Shrugged." In the first month of the Administration of Donald ("American carnage") Trump, during which Kellyanne Conway talked about alternative facts, "1984" jumped to the top of the Amazon best-seller list. (Steve Bannon is a particular fan of a 1973 French novel called "The Camp of the Saints," in which Europe is overrun by dark-skinned immigrants.) The duel of dystopias is nothing so much as yet another place poisoned by polarized politics, a proxy war of imaginary worlds.

Dystopia used to be a fiction of resistance; it's become a fiction of submission, the fiction of an untrusting, lonely, and sullen twenty-first century, the fiction of fake news and infowars, the fiction of helplessness and hopelessness. It cannot imagine a better future, and it doesn't ask anyone to bother to make one. It nurses grievances and indulges resentments; it doesn't call for courage; it finds that cowardice suffices. Its only admonition is: Despair more. It appeals to both the left and the right, because, in the end, it requires so little by way of literary, political, or moral imagination, asking only that you enjoy the company of people whose fear of the future aligns comfortably with your own. Left or right, the radical pessimism of an unremitting dystopianism has itself contributed to the unravelling of the liberal state and the weakening of a commitment to political pluralism. "This isn't a story about war," El Akkad writes in "American War." "It's about ruin." A story about ruin can be beautiful. Wreckage is romantic. But a politics of ruin is doomed. ♦

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Jill Lepore on the relationship between utopian and dystopian fiction and how the genres have evolved to reflect current social and political realities, such as the Trump Presidency.

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Dystopian fiction is hot. Sales of George Orwell's "1984" and Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" have skyrocketed since 2016. Young adult dystopias - for example, Suzanne Collins' "The Hunger Games," Veronica Roth's "Divergent," Lois Lowry's classic, "The Giver" - were best-sellers even before.

And with COVID-19, dystopias featuring diseases have taken on new life. Netflix reports a spike in popularity for "Outbreak," "12 Monkeys" and others.

Does this popularity signal that people think they live in a dystopia now? Haunting images of empty city squares, wild animals roaming streets and miles-long food pantry lines certainly suggest this.

We want to offer another view. "Dystopia" is a powerful but overused term. It is not a synonym for a terrible time.

The question for us as political scientists is not whether things are bad (they are), but how governments act. A government's poor handling of a crisis, while maddening and sometimes disastrous, does not constitute dystopia.

Legitimate coercion

As we argue in our book, " Survive and Resist: the Definitive Guide to Dystopian Politics," the definition of dystopia is political.

Dystopia is not a real place; it is a warning, usually about something bad the government is doing or something good it is failing to do. Actual dystopias are fictional, but real-life governments can be "dystopian" - as in, looking a lot like the fiction.

Defining a dystopia starts with establishing the characteristics of good governance. A good government protects its citizens in a noncoercive way. It is the body best positioned to prepare for and guard against natural and human-made horrors.

Good governments use what's called " legitimate coercion," legal force to which citizens agree to keep order and provide services like roads, schools and national security. Think of legitimate coercion as your willingness to stop at a red light, knowing it's better for you and others in the long run.

No government is perfect, but there are ways of judging the imperfection. Good governments (those least imperfect) include a strong core of democratic elements to check the powerful and create accountability. They also include constitutional and judicial measures to check the power of the majority. This setup acknowledges the need for government but evidences healthy skepticism of giving too much power to any one person or body.

Federalism, the division of power between national and subnational governments, is a further check. It has proved useful lately, with state governors and mayors emerging as strong political players during COVID-19.

Three kinds of dystopias

Bad governments lack checks and balances, and rule in the interest of the rulers rather than the people. Citizens can't participate in their own governance. But dystopian governments are a special kind of bad; they use illegitimate coercion like force, threats and the "disappearing" of dissidents to stay in power.

Our book catalogs three major dystopia types, based on the presence - or absence - of a functioning state and how much power it has.

There are, as in Orwell's "1984," overly powerful governments that infringe on individual lives and liberties. These are authoritarian states, run by dictators or powerful groups, like a single party or corporate-governance entity. Examples of these governments abound, including Assad's murderously repressive regime in Syria and the silencing of dissent and journalism in Russia.

The great danger of these is, as our country's Founding Fathers knew quite well, too much power on the part of any one person or group limits the options and autonomy of the masses.

Then there are dystopic states that seem nonauthoritarian but still take away basic human rights through market forces; we call these "capitocracies." Individual workers and consumers are often exploited by the political-industrial complex, and the environment and other public goods suffer. A great fictional example is Wall-E by Pixar (2008), in which the U.S. president is also CEO of "Buy 'N Large," a multinational corporation controlling the economy.

There are not perfect real-life examples of this, but elements are visible in the chaebol - family business - power in South Korea, and in various manifestations of corporate political power in the U.S, including deregulation, corporate personhood status and big-company bailouts.

Lastly there are state-of-nature dystopias, usually resulting from the collapse of a failed government. The resulting territory reverts to a primitive feudalism, ungoverned except for small tribal-held fiefdoms where individual dictators rule with impunity. The Citadel versus Gastown in the stunning 2015 movie "Mad Max: Fury Road" is a good fictional depiction. A real-life example was seen in the once barely governed Somalia, where, for almost 20 years until 2012, as a U.N. official described it, "armed warlords (were) fighting each other on a clan basis."

Fiction and real life

Indeed, political dystopia is often easier to see using the lens of fiction, which exaggerates behaviors, trends and patterns to make them more visible.

But behind the fiction there is always a real-world correlate. Orwell had Stalin, Franco and Hitler very much in mind when writing "1984."

Atwood, whom literary critics call the " prophet of dystopia," recently defined dystopia as when "[W]arlords and demagogues take over, some people forget that all people are people, enemies are created, vilified and dehumanized, minorities are persecuted, and human rights as such are shoved to the wall."

Some of this may be, as Atwood added, the "cusp of where we are living now."

But the U.S. is not a dystopia. It still has functioning democratic institutions. Many in the U.S. fight against dehumanization and persecution of minorities. Courts are adjudicating cases. Legislatures are passing bills. Congress has not adjourned, nor has the fundamental right of habeas corpus - the protection against illegal detention by the state - (yet) been suspended.

Crisis as opportunity

And still. One frequent warning is that a major crisis can cover for the rolling back of democracy and curtailing of freedoms. In Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale," a medical crisis is the pretext for suspending the Constitution.

In real life, too, crises facilitate authoritarian backsliding. In Hungary the pandemic has sped democracy's unraveling. The legislature gave strongman Prime Minister Viktor Orban the power to rule by sole decree indefinitely, the lower courts are suspended and free speech is restricted.

Similar dangers exist in any number of countries where democratic institutions are frayed or fragile; leaders with authoritarian tendencies may be tempted to leverage the crisis to consolidate power.

But there are also positive signs for democracy.

People are coming together in ways that didn't seem possible just a few months ago. This social capital is an important element in a democracy.

Ordinary people are performing incredible acts of kindness and generosity - from shopping for neighbors to serenading residents at a nursing home to a mass movement to sew facemasks.

In politics, Wisconsin primary voters risked their lives to exercise their right to vote during the height of the pandemic. Citizens and civil society are pushing federal and state governments to ensure election safety and integrity in the remaining primaries and the November election.

Despite the eerie silence in public spaces, despite the preventable deaths that should weigh heavily on the consciences of public officials, even despite the authoritarian tendencies of too many leaders, the U.S. is not a dystopia - yet.

Overuse clouds the word's meaning. Fictional dystopias warn of preventable futures; those warnings can help avert the actual demise of democracy.

[ Get facts about coronavirus and the latest research. Sign up for The Conversation's newsletter.]

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'Dystopia' is a term that's gained popularity during the coronavirus pandemic. But it's not a synonym for 'a bad time,' and a government's poor handling of a crisis does not constitute dystopia.

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California is Living America's Dystopian Future

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California is Living America's Dystopian Future

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The Golden State is on fire, which means that an idea of American utopia is on fire, too.

Utopias are the good places of our imagination, while dystopias are the places where everything goes terribly wrong, where evil triumphs and nature destroys her own. Frequently utopias and dystopias are the same place, because perfection may not be possible without someone suffering.

Ursula LeGuin writes about this paradox in " The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," a story about the moral dilemma of living in a city called Omelas whose prosperity is made possible by one child's pain. As the story's title makes clear, most people don't walk away from the beautiful place, even when its secret is known.

California often finds itself the Omelas of the American imagination. For some, it's the beautiful place where having it all means shafting someone else, as in Roman Polanski's "Chinatown," about Los Angeles' theft of water from the Owens Valley. Or as in the magical theme park, Disneyland, which substantially underpays some of its workers.

The novelists Octavia Butler, Edan Lepucki, Karl Taro Greenfeld, Paolo Bacigalupi and Claire Vaye Watkins are among the many who have imagined the Golden State as a dystopian novel. In their novels, California is either on fire, in extreme drought or both. They all picture California's descent as a combination of climate crisis and social unrest.

Read more: Silicon Valley, from 'heart's delight' to toxic wasteland

For these authors, climate change hints at the dark secret of the perfect place, of bad decisions that all America shares. Their novels suggest that if California looks like a dystopia before other American places, that's because it's often in the lead.

"California is America fast-forward," sociologist Manuel Pastor says.

AP/Christian Monterossa

'Ecology of fear'

The wildfires that ravage California light up America's screens with terror. Suburban homes are stripped to their foundations; Samaritans lead horses from burning barns.

The historian Mike Davis reminds us that California has long seemed an "ecology of fear" for Euro-Americans. Settlers from Northern Europe and the East Coast did not understand Southern California's climate, which is prone to unpredictability and drought.

"It is Walden Pond on LSD," Davis writes, meaning that it is a psychedelic version of American nature spots like Walden Pond, in New England.

The unfamiliarity of California's climate led to poor decisions about where to build from the start. Now Californians, like most western Americans, live too close to their wildlands, which are drying into tinderboxes.

"In the United States, there are now more than 46 million single family homes, several hundred thousand businesses, and 120 million people living and working in and around the country's forests," writes the journalist Edward Struzik, in "Firestorm," his book about "how wildfire will shape our future."

America has created the combustible environment called intermix, where residential and commercial uses spill into wildlands. America craves inexpensive electricity, too, which means that overhead power lines run through forests and chaparral.

Overhead lines have sparked some of the worst recent fires in California and other American places like New Mexico and Tennessee.

California utility company PG&E estimates the cost for converting overhead to underground lines at US$3 million per mile. While cost estimates vary, such a project surely will be expensive and might take a century to complete.

Overhead infrastructure wasn't made for extreme weather, like the estimated 80 mph winds that inspired a rare "extreme red flag" warning in Southern California.

Pleasure in the state's demise

On fire, California is a dystopian novel that the rest of America reads avidly, and at times with schadenfreude, that feeling of joy that a person may take in another's suffering.

California ranks as one of the happiest states in the U.S., at number 13. But California came in last in a 2012 poll on which states Americans like.

Maybe it's the happiness that annoys others, which some perceive as phony ("tofu," "silicone" and "dyed hair," said Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018, about what is wrong with California).

When California was on fire in 2018, with thousands missing and dozens dead, President Donald Trump tweeted that the state mismanaged its forests. He tweeted the same thing during the recent fires, with more force. Schadenfreude? Arguably, the nation is struggling to address the fire challenges of the intermix, and California is ahead of the rest.

California supposedly is most hated by conservatives. But it nurtured the careers of conservative icons Ronald Reagan and Rush Limbaugh, plus a pair of conservative ballot measures, Prop 13 and Prop 187, that cut taxes as well as services to immigrants.

It is also the birthplace of modern progressive movements, from the United Farm Workers to environmentalism. California has been a seedbed of American political passions, to the Right and Left. Perhaps that's why it arouses passion - and envy.

Confronting the secret

Dystopian thought criticizes what it loves in an attempt to make it better.

If California is living a dystopian novel, it is also a first responder to the fires of a changing planet.

Some of the state's utility companies are getting smarter about infrastructure fixes. Evacuations are going better in the places where evacuations happened before. Californians voted in a landmark cap-and-trade bill to curb greenhouse gas emissions, and now they are trying to improve on it.

The state's climate policy and renewed support for investment in public education signal that it is getting past the nation's racial generation gap, where older white voters don't see themselves in a demographically browner youth and resist funding them.

Living in Omelas means either compromising with injustice or learning how to make the world better before others even know that it's broken.

Stay tuned.

[ You're smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation's authors and editors. You can get our highlights each weekend. ]

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California is living America's dystopian future

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The Golden State is on fire, which means that an idea of American utopia is on fire, too. Utopias are the good places of our imagination, while dystopias are the places where everything goes terribly wrong, where evil triumphs and nature destroys her own.

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Blade Runner’s chillingly prescient vision of the future

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Blade Runner’s chillingly prescient vision of the future

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Can corporations become so powerful that they dictate the way we feel? Can machines get mad - like, really mad - at their makers? Can people learn to love machines?

These are a few of the questions raised by Ridley Scott's influential sci-fi neo-noir film " Blade Runner " (1982), which imagines a corporation whose product tests the limits of the machine-man divide.

Looking back at the original theatrical release of "Blade Runner" - just as its sequel, "Blade Runner 2049" opens in theaters - I'm struck by the original's ambivalence about technology and its chillingly prescient vision of corporate attempts to control human feelings.

From machine killer to machine lover

Even though the film was tepidly received at the time of its release, its detractors agreed that its imagining of Los Angeles in 2019 was wonderfully atmospheric and artfully disconcerting. Looming over a dingy, rain-soaked City of Angels is Tyrell Corporation, whose namesake, Dr. Tyrell (Joe Turkel), announces, "Commerce is our goal here at Tyrell. More human than human is our motto."

Tyrell creates robots called replicants, which are difficult to differentiate from humans. They are designed to be worker-slaves - with designations like "combat model" or "pleasure model" - and to expire after four years.

Batty (Rutger Hauer) and Pris (Darryl Hannah) are two members of a small cohort of rebelling replicants who escape their enslavement and hope to extend their lives beyond the four years allotted them by their makers. These replicant models even possess fake memories, which Tyrell implanted as a way to buffer the machine's anxieties. Instead, the memories create a longing for an unattainable future. The machines want to be treated like people, too.

Deckard (Harrison Ford), a policeman (and maybe a replicant too), is tasked with eliminating the escaped machines. During his search, he meets a special replicant who lacks the corporate safeguard of a four-year lifespan: the beautiful Rachael (Sean Young), who shoots and kills one of her own in order to save Deckard. This opens the door for Deckard to acknowledge growing feelings towards a machine who has developed the will to live and love beyond the existence imagined for her by Tyrell Corp.

The greatest challenge to Deckard comes from combat model Batty, who has demonstrably more passion for existence than the affectless Deckard.

The film's climax is a duel to the death between Deckard and Batty, in which Batty ends up not just sparing but saving Deckard. As Deckard watches Batty expire, he envies the replicant's lust for life at the very moment it escapes him. Batty seems more human than the humans in this world, but Tyrell's motto is both clue and trap.

Deckard's end-of-film decision to escape with Rachael defies the rules of the corporation and of society. But it's also an acknowledgment of the successful, seamless integration of machine and human life.

"Blade Runner" imagines a world in which human machines are created to serve people, but Deckard's interactions with these replicants reveals the thinness of the line: He goes from being on assignment as a machine killer to falling in love with a machine.

A world succumbing to machines

Today, the relationship between corporations, machines and humans defines modern life in ways that Ridley Scott - even in his wildest and most dystopic imagination - couldn't have forecast in 1982.

In "Blade Runner," implanted memories are propped up by coveted (but fake) family photos. Yet a world in which memory is fragile and malleable seems all too possible and familiar. Recent studies have shown that people's memories are increasingly susceptible to being warped by social media misinformation, whether it's stories of fake terrorist attacks or Muslims celebrating after 9/11. When this misinformation spreads on social media networks, it can create and reinforce false collective memories, fomenting a crisis of reality that can skew election results or whip up small town hysteria.

Meanwhile, Facebook has studied how it can manipulate the way its users feel - and yet over a billion people a day log on to willingly participate in its massive data collection efforts.

Our entrancement with technology might seem less dramatic than the full-blown love affair that Scott imagined, but it's no less all-consuming. We often prioritize our smartphones over human social interactions, with millennials checking their phones over 150 times a day. In fact, even as people increasingly feel that they cannot live without their smartphones, many say that the devices are ruining their relationships.

And at a time when we're faced with the likelihood of being unable to differentiate between what's real and what's fake - a world of Twitter bots and doctored photographs, trolling and faux-outrage, mechanical pets and plastic surgery - we might be well served by recalling Deckard's first conversation upon arriving at Tyrell Corp. Spotting an owl, Deckard asks, "It's artificial?" Rachael replies, not skipping a beat, "Of course it is."

In "Blade Runner," reality no longer really matters.

How much longer will it matter to us?

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Blade Runner's chillingly prescient vision of the future

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Can corporations become so powerful that they dictate the way we feel? Can machines get mad - like, really mad - at their makers? Can people learn to love machines? These are a few of the questions raised by Ridley Scott's influential sci-fi neo-noir film " Blade Runner " (1982), which imagines a corporation whose product tests the limits of the machine-man divide.

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Girls on Fire: Political Empowerment in Young Adult Dystopia

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Girls on Fire: Political Empowerment in Young Adult Dystopia

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Young adult dystopian characters like Insurgent's Tris are inspiring their female fans to shatter the glass ceiling. Lionsgate Films

Young Adult (YA) dystopia stories have never been more popular, and today's release of Insurgent - the second film in the Divergent series - is only the most recent example.

This series has inspired popular trends like Divergent-themed personality tests, self-defense training and even tattoos (out of stock!).

Meanwhile, books like Legend, Under the Never Sky, Matched and Blood Red Road have all spawned trilogies and been optioned for movies. And beyond the traditional fare of toys, dolls and costumes, The Hunger Games series - especially Katniss, the "girl on fire" protagonist - has inspired archery lessons, make up campaigns, birthday cakes and fashion spreads.

Clearly, YA dystopia is having an effect on consumerism and pop culture. Media coverage, however, will still often center on romantic elements of the genre's books and movies: the relationships and crushes among various characters. It also tends to discount the genre as a whole because of the film adaptations.

But it's the political potential of this literary phenomenon - especially for empowering girls - that could ultimately be the genre's most profound and lasting influence. And though its staying power has yet to be tested, YA dystopia has spurred legions of readers towards promoting social justice.

Dystopian girl power

Unlike past young adult series geared towards teen girls - The Babysitter's Club, Clueless, Twilight - these books are about more than love triangles, hairstyles or popularity.

Instead, the YA dystopia genre, as a whole, does what all great science fiction - from Brave New World to Mad Max - sets out to do: it holds up a mirror to our world, acting as a tool for social critique.

As many have noted, these dystopian futures are not so distant. Today, we face many of the same problems contained in these fictional worlds: violence against women, climate-related catastrophes, extreme inequalities in wealth and impenetrable power structures.

Many YA dystopia books feature girls who buck the conventions of our world as much as theirs, challenging gender roles and expectations. For example, their female protagonists often take on traditionally masculine roles. Instead of acting as bystanders or caretakers, they fight, investigate, infiltrate, rescue, protect, journey and lead.

This isn't the case in the popular vampire-themed Twilight series, where protagonist Bella Swan is often a passive player. But in YA dystopia novels, female characters like Cassia (in Matched) and Eve (from the Eve series) refuse to obediently accept the hand that's been dealt to them.

Most of these books begin with a girl protagonist experiencing and discovering the corruption and injustice of society. From there, she has to navigate just to survive. These girls are beaten and bruised, shot and burned, starved and oppressed, manipulated and used. But they do more than simply survive.

In Birthmarked, Gaia's facial scar keeps her from being adopted into the Enclave, a society separated from her community by a wall. Gaia's parents are arrested, which leads Gaia to discover that life inside the wall is not as ideal as she imagined it to be. Rather than accept the status quo, like all "girls on fire" she fights back: first by going inside the wall to try to find her parents, and then by protecting her baby sister from the Enclave.

The Summer Prince's June is an artist competing for a prestigious prize. But when she discovers that the price she will have to pay to win includes not only her integrity, but also the continued subjugation of the lower class, she turns her art into a political weapon.

Both Gaia and June become leaders in ways that real girls and women in the U.S. rarely do. Possessing agency and power, characters like Gaia and June act as voices for the the oppressed masses.

Diversity tackled head on

Like other areas of pop culture, children's literature continues to be dominated by white, male characters. In response, Malinda Lo and Cindy Pon created Diversity in YA in 2011. Last year, a number of bloggers, authors and academics launched the campaign #WeNeedDiverseBooks.

They're concerned because a lack of diversity fails to accurately represent a changing world - a travesty in the realm of dystopian fiction where a whitewashed future is illogical, at best.

While the most well known works in YA dystopia - The Hunger Games, Divergent, Uglies - feature white or racially ambiguous girls as their protagonists, many science fiction and dystopian YA novels complicate the ways in which race is imagined, or, rather, ignored.

Victoria Law's column for Bitch Magazine has also brought attention to girls of color in dystopia, books that continue to be marginalized in the mainstream.

Trilogies like Partials, Legend and The Immortal Rules explicitly mention non-white racial features and ethnic heritage, though these aspects are of little thematic importance. But other books - the Tankborn series, Shadows Cast By Stars, Orleans, The Summer Prince - center on characters whose experiences are shaped by their racial and ethnic heritages in new, dystopian contexts.

Ultimately, these characters give voice and agency to girls of color in fiction and reality, providing an outlet that's sorely lacking in other corners of YA literature.

Literature-inspired activism

The radical politics of YA dystopia have even seeped off the page. For example, adults and young adults alike are finding value in the ideas and symbols provided by The Hunger Games, many of which have been co-opted for real-life protests and social movements.

The AFL-CIO brings attention to poverty and the need for social justice through its "We Are the Districts" campaign - a reference to districts that revolt against the Capitol of Panem in The Hunger Games. And in Korea, a young woman and her friends were detained after holding up the Hunger Games' three-finger salute to protest their authoritarian government.

Athit Perawongmetha/Reuters

Finally, the symbol of the "girl on fire" has empowered girls in the US - and even around the world. In Kenya, the Girls on Fire Leadership Camp draws inspiration from singer Alicia Keys, giving at-risk girls an opportunity to "experience their country for the first time" and to "view themselves as part of the solution and unlock their full potential as young leaders and change makers."

When it comes to the ideas, practices and possibilities that stem from YA dystopia, it doesn't matter that they originate in fictional works.

Real or not real, these characters, stories and settings ask to us to think about the past, present and future, to imagine new possibilities and opportunities for the marginalized and oppressed - and to even take to the streets.

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Girls on fire: political empowerment in young adult dystopia

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Young Adult (YA) dystopia stories have never been more popular, and today's release of Insurgent - the second film in the Divergent series - is only the most recent example. This series has inspired popular trends like Divergent-themed personality tests, self-defense training and even tattoos (out of stock!).

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By Sara Teasdale

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And in my Lesbos, over leagues of sea,
The temples glimmer moonwise in the trees.
Twilight has veiled the little flower face
Here on my heart, but still the night is kind
And leaves her warm sweet weight against my breast.
Am I that Sappho who would run at dusk

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There Will Come Soft Rains - There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,

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By Tanya Ward

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We are the people that you created.
A generation going nowhere.
We are the kids that you hate.
Brought up by fear and paranoia.
The technology era,
distinguished by guns and violence.
Raised and spoiled;
aggression and hate the new emotions.
Alienated from each other.
Passion and empathy completely diminished.
A dystopian world,
ruled by liars and thieves.
Pain is coupled with pleasure.
Angst and depression consuming the minds.
Break away from the hate.
Become a better generation.
We are not the nowhere kids.

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We are the people that you created.A generation going nowhere.We are the kids that you hate.Brought up by fear and paranoia.The technology era,distinguished by guns and violence.Raised and spoiled;aggression and hate the new emotions.Alienated from each other.Passion and empathy completely diminished.A dystopian world,ruled by liars and thieves.Pain is coupled with pleasure.Angst and depression consuming the minds.Break away from the hate.Become a better generation.We are not the nowhere kids.

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15 Gripping Dystopian Novels for Young Readers

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15 Gripping Dystopian Novels for Young Readers

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By Charlotte Taylor

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Dystopian science fiction and fantasy appeals to many kids in middle school (possibly not a coincidence), but though kids that age might be drawn to the young adult titles, those often have levels of violence and romance that are still too much for 9-12 year olds (I'm looking at you, Hunger Games). Fortunately there are plenty of middle grade friendly dystopias whose disastrous futures and oppressive governments will entrance young readers without giving them nightmares.

The Lost Continent, by Tui T. Sutherland, and its sequels, The Hive Queen and The beloved Wings of Fire series is set in world of dragons full of evil rulers and considerable violence. The third story arc in the saga, set on a new continent, takes the books into full dystopian territory. The evil Hivewing queen tolerates no dissent, enslaves the Silk Wings, and is determined to complete the genocide of the Leaf Wings. To make things even more dire, The Poison Jungle introduces the Othermind, a hostile organism that is taking control of the Hivewings with its Breath of Evil in order to exterminate all dragon kind. Fortunately, there are plucky and lovable young dragons fighting back with help from some of the original dragons come from across the ocean, and readers can trust that Sutherland will let them prevail in the end, but at the moment things are bleak and dystopian indeed...

Outwalkers, by Fiona Shaw
In a future England, where the boarders are closed and people are chipped to keep them "safe" (aka under governmental control), an orphaned boy named Jake is sent to a government home that's more prison than hope. He escapes, to set out on an impossible journey to his grandparents in Scotland, across the heavily militarized boarder. Fortunately for Jake, he's found by a band of Outwalkers, other kids trying to reach the free north. The Outwalker kids have been on their own long enough to learn how to survive...but even once they remove their chips, the journey north is fraught with danger. And when a new girl who is wanted by one of the highest government officials in the country joins their band, a safe way north seems even harder to believe in. It's a horrible future with a truly evil government, but the kids are brave and their struggle to survive and outwit the military forces pursuing them is exciting reading!

Blue Window, by Adina Rishe Gewirtz
Not all fantasy doorways lead to friendly places. When five siblings tumble through a strange blue window, they find themselves in a dystopian nightmare. It's a magical land whose magic is horribly distorted; its people seem to be physically morphing into bestial forms, and the five kids stand out as a result of their unchanged faces. The world is under the control of a mad Genius, who wants control of the kids before they can fulfill the prophecy that will defeat him. The kids just want to go home, but caught in a war, and used by various factions, that seems an increasingly unlikely dream, even when they begin to develop their own magical powers. It's not a happy fantasy, what with its dystopian darkness, but it is deeply memorable.

Forgotten City, by Michael Ford
Kobi has lived his whole life alone with his father in an abandoned school. Around the school is a wild land full of mutant, and deadly, plants and animals created after agricultural experimenting went horrible wrong, creating the Waste, that will ultimately kill any human infected with it. Kobi's father makes visits outside to his old lab in the city, and when he doesn't return from one such trip, Kobi sets out to find him. Kobi journeys from a lonely life to the center of a conspiracy that's keeping the humanity from being saved from the Waste. He finds he and his father aren't alone, and that the worst enemy isn't the mutant creatures, but people who put their own desire for wealth and power ahead of everything else. Along with the gripping specter of civilization held in thrall to a man-made plague, there's plenty of adventure, plenty of friendship (but with lots of intrigue), and a great mystery to keep the pages turning briskly!

The Last Human, by Lee Bacon
In a future world, robots have exterminated humanity to save the earth from environmental destruction. Now the robots live peaceful lives, with their President constantly reminding them of human horrors. 12-year-old XR_935 and his team are at their daily work when they encounter a human girl called Emma, the only survivor of a sickness that swept through the underground bunker that was her home. The robots face a dilemma. Emma doesn't seem like a monster, and XR_935 realizes that she has almost no chance of surviving a world full of enemy robots. So the robot team decides to help her, and XR_935 starts to question everything the President has been saying. This is dystopian story from a human point of view, but the robot society itself has dystopian elements, with knowledge controlled by a dictator, with any hint of free will suppressed. But it's a hopeful dystopia, that kids who like friendship adventures will enjoy lots!

Though The Giver is still widely read and taught in schools, there are plenty of new middle grade dystopias to choose from. Here are some of my favorites.

Edge of Extinction: the Ark Plan, by Laura Martin
Civilization collapsed when the dinosaurs were brought back to life. They brought a virus with them that almost wiped out humanity, and then made themselves at home in the wild. Survivors banded together in underground communities run by totalitarian governments, keeping remnants of civilization intact. Sky has never been outside her community, but when she finds a letter from her father who left many years ago, she decides to follow the instructions he left her and travel to Lake Michigan to find him. With her best friend, Shawn, she sets off into the dinosaur-infested outside world. But Sky and Shawn are woefully unprepared to survive in an ordinary world, let alone one full of predators! The dinosaurs aren't the only ones hunting them-the government of their community also has a mysterious interest in wanting to bring them back. It's an exciting adventure, with the dystopian framework adding tension to the survival story.

Icebreaker, by Lian Tanner, and its sequels, Sunker's Deep and Three hundred years ago, civilization collapsed in a wave of anti-technology fervor. Ever since then, the Oyster, an ancient icebreaker, has been circling around and around the southern sea. The Oyster was part of a plan to salvage civilization for the future, but this purpose has been forgotten, and its inhabitants have broken into three warring tribes. Twelve-year-old Petrel is an outcast who belongs to no tribe. In the dark depths of the giant ship, her only friends are two utterly extraordinary rats. Then a boy is found alone on an iceberg, and Petrel saves him. But he's been sent on a mission from the Devouts of the anti-technology government to find and destroy the Oyster, along with its secrets. The second and third books expand the scope of the series beyond the single vessel, sending Petrel and her friends out to directly confront the Devouts. The vividly described settings, the strange future world, and the great cast of characters make for fascinating reading.
What are your favorite dystopian novels for young readers?

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15 Gripping Dystopian Novels for Young Readers

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Dystopian science fiction and fantasy appeals to many kids in middle school (possibly not a coincidence), but though kids that age might be drawn to the young adult titles, those often have levels of violence and romance that are still too much for 9-12 year olds (I'm looking at you, Hunger Games).

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The Best Dystopian Novels for Middle School Book Clubs 

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The Best Dystopian Novels for Middle School Book Clubs 

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In 8th grade language arts, our first major reading unit of the year is a Dystopian Series Book Club unit. Students read the first two books in a dystopian series, participating in weekly book club meetings to explore the genre, make real-world connections & more.

Not only is this one of my favorite units ever, but it's also frequently cited as a favorite on my students' end-of-year surveys. Though I'd like to believe it's due to our engaging lessons and activities, I know the real MVPs are the book choices.

That being said, here are a list of the top dystopian novels my middle school students have loved throughout the years.
Friendly heads up that this post contains Amazon affiliate links, which means I'll earn a few cents (at no extra cost to you) if you purchase a book through one of the links below. Thanks for supporting my work. :)

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The Best Dystopian Novels for Middle School Book Clubs - Hello, Teacher Lady

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In 8th grade language arts, our first major reading unit of the year is a Dystopian Series Book Club unit. Students read the first two books in a dystopian series, participating in weekly book club meetings to explore the genre, make real-world connections & more.

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6 Dystopian Novels For Middle School About the Power of Change 

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6 Dystopian Novels For Middle School About the Power of Change 

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6 dystopian novels for middle school about the power of change

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Merriam-Webster's Dictionary defines a dystopia as "an imagined world or society in which people lead wretched, dehumanized, fearful lives." This description sounds dark and gloomy, but as a former English teacher, I've always enjoyed reading dystopian novels the most, and my kids have loved them just as much.

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110 books based on 56 votes: The Giver by Lois Lowry, The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau, Among the Hidden by Margaret Peterson Haddix, Among the Enemy b...

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The Hunger Games (2012 Movie) - Official Theatrical Trailer - Jennifer Lawrence & Liam Hemsworth

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(Preview each story first)

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Dystopian stories with short summaries and links for easy reading. For all fans of dystopian fiction.

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Young adult dystopias infographic - Feed Me Books Now