Late last month The Tyee published my article Are Dystopian Heroines Agents for Change? Excerpt:
Science fiction has always been political, ever since Thomas More wrote Utopia as a witty satire on the failings of Christian Europe. Precisely because it's not obviously about present politics, it's a safe way to criticize the status quo. (Thomas More lost his head, but not because of his fiction.)
Ever since, science fiction has shown us a range of utopias where everything is wonderful and dystopias where nothing is good. All were really about the current state of affairs. Very few have had any real political effect, but they all offer insights into the social temper of their times.
In the last few years, the dystopia has suddenly surged to dominate both popular and "serious" literature. The young-adult (YA) novel, a subgenre once aimed at slow or reluctant teen readers, is now read far outside its target market, largely because it often deals with big social issues like sexual identity and race. Dystopias are a good venue for such issues.
YA dystopias aimed at girls have now become bestsellers -- and those books have become big business as film series like The Hunger Games and Divergent.
This is a dramatic change from my own early days as a science fiction writer, when my editors warned me dystopias didn't sell and neither did kids' stories with girls as protagonists (boys wouldn't read them, I was told).
After moping for years about the lack of good science fiction like the pulp I grew up with, I've recently been reading a great many novels that leave my teenage heroes Heinlein and Asimov in the dust. (My own novels of the 1980s and '90s aren't even in the running.)
Many of them are by women, and feature young women as protagonists. They're both well-written and well-crafted, with complicated characters living in worlds described with an almost documentary concreteness. As entertainment, they're superb.
But I find them notably lacking in the kind of political awareness a good dystopian writer ought to display.
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