The Hunger Games, Wayward Pines, The Maze Runner, In the After, The Giver, Dust.. The list drifts on into the forever. Each story different than the last, but each dancing around the same premise: After the world ends we will discover a new, self-contained world in which all of our problems and issues are explored on a micro-cosmic scale and we, quite quickly, will devolve into a caricature of Orwellian dystopia…or we already have.
All of these books tend to start/develop in the same fashion: The world is over. Despite this there is a piece of that world that remains, walled off from the abyss and protected by a strict set of laws or rules. Often the books focus on those who seek to challenge this structure and the protagonist (and thus the reader) is fueled by a desire to either escape or to challenge the dominant ideology. In Demitria Lunetta’s In the After series, the protagonist finds herself in a world filled with zombie-like creatures. She comes upon a safe-haven, a city that thrives and seeks to rebuild humanity. However, the rules of the society are counter to everything she see’s as important to her rebellious teen nature. I think the fact that the majority of these novels are YA fiction says something. In many ways the novels feel like a response to an American society that, for large swaths of the country, exists primarily in HOA-sanctioned and controlled enclaves in which we live under a series of seemingly endless and often psychotic rules designed to keep people in line and similar. I suspect that, on some level, the books are targeted at an audience growing up in this world with the ability to change it or at least understand the consequences of it.
There is no question that this theme has gained primacy in the YA spectrum. The questions I’m wondering about are where is it going and how is it going to impact this generation of readers and thinkers?