There is something romantic about survival.

 Dystopian, Theme Week, Topics in Writing  1 Response »
Aug 242010
 

The Romance of Filth and Oppression

Why oh why oh why do we like stories about characters that are unwashed, half-starved, and oppressed financially, socially, culturally and sexually? Why do we enjoy that? It sounds terrible right? No one wants their main character to have to deal with lice and rotting food and constant pain. Ugh.

And yet. And yet. And yet. Dystopian fiction is EVERYWHERE in all shapes, sizes and colors, for all types of dispositions.

There’s a Dirty, Miserable Dystopia for Everyone.

  • The-worlds-gone-to-hell-in-a-handbasket, all financial sectors in all major countries have collapsed leaving scary barter systems and massive movements of organized crime and corruption as in Restoring Harmony by Joelle Anthony.
  • Your horror dystopians with zombie apocalypses (The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan) vampire apocalypses (The Passage by Justin Cronin).
  • Speculative resource loss (Empty by Suzanne Weyn, Carbon Diaries 2015 by Saci Lloyd, etc etc)
  • You’ve got your 1984 type dystopias like, well ugh, 1984, but also CANDOR by Pam Bachorz, The Maze Runner by James Dashner, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, etc etc.
  • There are plenty of fatal stories about all the men dying out or all the women dying out or some variation there of (The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness, Nomansland by Lesley Hauge, Epitaph Road by David Patneaude)
  • There are dirty Mad Max style dystopias and super regulated Bladerunner style dystopias.

There’s Something Romantic About Survival

The one thing they all have in common is one character glances up from the dark tunnel of their miserable life and dreams of something more. Maybe they are forced into this dream, maybe it is one of necessity or one of hope, but they all have it. The character is resourceful and resilient and defies the status quo in order to find the light.

We like following these characters because we all like to think we could be them if it came to it.

There’s something romantic about survival.

The Future as It Could Be

Lots of people love historical fiction because it is something we’ll never be able to experience (Unless historical = within our lifetime and that’s really more contemporary or out-dated contemporary)

But the future holds all the possibilities of the world. All that is possible is probable and all that is probably is easily romanticized.

Dystopia is never about what was, it is always about what could be, and so no matter how improbable the zombie/vampire/robot apocalypse might seem, because it HASN’T happened yet there’s always a chance that it COULD happen. And there’s something very satisfying to our ego when we daydream about not just surviving but kicking zombie/vampire/robot ass in the coming war. How will our trusty iPads serve us in the coming dystopia? What crazy Fifth Element fashions will we be wearing? How will we be thrown together with our passionate romantic lead? Will they live? Will I live? Will we go down in a blaze of glory together?

Games to Play with Your Friends

Ok, here’s another little exercise. Think back to the hype that surrounded the first episode of LOST. Everyone and their mother wanted to see the show about a group of people stranded on a deserted island. Why? Well, everyone raise their hand if they remember watching that first episode and imagining all the things YOU would do to survive such an ordeal. How many of you thought Sawyer had the right idea about hording? Or were you with the group that wanted to build a bigger bonfire in an effort to be spotted by a plane or ship? Were you thinking you’d run around helping people or were you the one thinking you’d organize everyone, find shelter, food, and water?

The way you watched the first episode of LOST is the reason we like to read about dystopias. We want to imagine what we’d do if we were put in such a terrible situation (without actually being put in it) and then how we’d survive.

There’s something romantic about survival.

Here’s another exercise: If you were stranded on a deserted island, and you could only have three items, what items would you take with you?

Hard question, right? Most people would think of the easy things: Food, Water, Weapon. Or they’d think nostalgic things: Notebook, Favorite Book, Picture of their kids. Someone very resourceful would say: Backpack, Bowie knife, and an extra pair of underwear. Most people could play this game with friends for hours. It’s fun to imagine and whittle your list down.

Would you survive the coming dark times? It’s a very important meme floating around Facebook these days. I know I wouldn’t. Mentally and creatively sure, but physically I need to lose some weight and join a gym first if I’m running (from zombies, crazy neighbors, radioactive clouds WHATEVER). If I don’t have to run from anything I’ll probably be ok.

Would you join the resistance movement or just plod along in the hopes it might get better?  Would you do whatever was necessary to survive? Man, I could play this game for HOURS.

I think I’m more of a resistance joiner myself, but who knows? I don’t think I’d be very good at starving, or drinking ditch water, or lying to robots, or living without soap, or shooting my thieving neighbors when they sneak into my secret backyard vegetable garden.

I think I’m just better at reading and writing an imaginary world of Very Bad Things.

Three Books, One Weekend

 Book Covers, Book Reviews, Fantastic Authors  1 Response »
Aug 192010
 

Because of my dentist woes last weekend, I tackled 3 books in 2 days. And by tackled I really mean I was swept away by 3 books in 2 days.

The first: An Amazon box was waiting for me when I got home containing As You Wish by Jackson Pearce and One Night That Changes Everything by Lauren Barnholdt. I was gloomy so I plopped down on the couch with One Night That Changes Everything (which, by the way, has a cover I’m not crazy about but a title to die for. Edit to add: I’m not crazy about the cover because the girl on the cover looks way too happy. Eliza is on the verge of a nervous breakdown until like 15 pages from the end.)

With only dinner to interrupt my reading, in three hours I’d consumed the book in its entirety.

I’d call this sort of book Candy Fiction if that term didn’t somehow imply there was something fluffy and inconsequential about it. What I mean by Candy Fiction is that it goes down so easy you start with a couple of pages and before you know it you’ve indulged in the entire bag.

Eliza broke up with Cooper when she discovered he was a slimeball. She posted something devastating about him on a social networking site. Brown turns down his application because of it and his creepy, high school fraternity friends seek revenge on her by stealing a very important notebook   from her locker and blackmailing her with it. The notebook contains all of her emotional fears…things she’d like to do but doesn’t have the courage to do. This includes petty things like kissing a boy she crushes on to more serious things like telling her sister a crushing secret or telling her best friends that one of them is a tease and the other is a door mat for her “boyfriend.” The blackmail? Cooper’s friends make her traverse the Boston streets accomplishing various tasks from her notebook. Relationships are made and broken and changed before dawn when it all comes to a very dramatic (though not surprising) head.

I liked the relationships between the various characters. My only big beef is that time seems to be a little warped in the book because a LOT of things happen in what is essentially only like 8 hours. No one seems to have curfews and the main character’s friends ditch her for ridiculous reasons so many times I would have strangled them all before morning (I love them anyway.)

Book 2 happened Friday night after everyone headed to bed.

Z for Zachariah by Robert C. O’Brien is deeply, heartbreakingly disturbing.

(Also, this book was first published in 1975. The author was born in 1918 and died in 1978. The book is so well written you can’t really tell when the book was published. TAKE NOTE! A dystopian fiction should never feel dated.)

A dystopia set after a nuclear war that kills at least everything and everyone in the United States. Not just bombs, the enemy also dropped Nerve Gas and other horrible things into the water and the air. One teenage girl survives in a remote valley. Her lake is fed from an underground stream and due to the shape of the valley it seems to have its own weather and air pressure which keeps out a lot of the radiation and nerve gas during the attacks. When her family goes out to find out what’s happened, they never return.

A year passes before she sees another person. A man who has traveled in from Ithaca, NY in a radiation suit his lab designed just before the war started. What Ann discovers, though, is that there are worse things than being alone.

I read the book in its entirety by 3am because I had to find out what happened to Ann when the man arrived. The answer? Terrible things.

Ann was the original Katniss. She’s all over that valley, up trees, surviving better than anyone could in such a devastating situation. This is a true dystopia, where things really are as bad as they could be.

The third book I read Saturday after I returned miserable from the dentist and didn’t want to leave the couch. That’s Jackson Pearce’s As You Wish.

I read Jackson’s Sisters Red which I heard was so amazing and better than her debut novel and yeah, it was good. But I think I deeply enjoyed As You Wish more. It was a debut novel Jackson should be proud of.

Viola doesn’t belong. She used to belong, before her best friend and boyfriend came out of the closet. Now she’s awkward and out of line from the rest of her life. And she wants more than anything to be back to the way things were.

This wish is so powerful that it pulls a jinn from his world into hers to grant her three wishes. She’s dubious and terrified of him, he wishes she’d hurry up and wish for better hair, hips, and wardrobe. He wishes she’d wish for anything so he could get back home where he doesn’t age and doesn’t have to deal with her weird mortal whims. In the human world he ages, and he hates it.

But Viola doesn’t want a wish to fix her problems. She wants to fix her problems, and hates the idea of using a crutch like Jinn. So she starts treating him like a friend, giving him a name and offering him parts of her life. And much to his shock, he kind of likes not being treated like a servant or object. He likes having a name.

After a horrible accidental first wish, both Viola and Jinn realize the inevitable…despite their growing friendship, once she uses her last wish Jinn will be gone and Viola will have forgotten he was ever there at all.

Another Candy Fiction book, but I loved it. I ate it all up in only a few hours because I just had to know what happened to their friendship and blooming love. I had to know how Viola got her life back. And it was satisfying. And heartbreaking. And really beautiful. It was a love story. A good love story. And I just adore love stories. As You Wish comes highly recommended from ME. I loved all three books I read, but this one was by far the most surprising and the most satisfying.