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But ask die hard readers of The Hunger Games, Legend, Maze Runner, Across the Universe, Maximum Ride, Divergent, what dystopian fiction is and you might be surprised.
My guess is they'll recognize the name in an instant and in an animated voice tell you that it's exciting stuff about people being treated really badly.
Stories about misery? Well yes, but misery is only the catalyst for what happens in these books. What they're really about is heroism: Teens rebelling against cruel rulers in a futuristic world that's been stripped of all of its greenery and goodwill.
Here's how the dystopian tale generally goes:
First, something cataclysmic happens that destroys society as we know it -- usually before a book begins. War, plague, environmental disaster, that sort of thing. Then maniacal adults take over the crumbling mess that's left. They're on a power trip to control everyone and their cruelty knows no bounds. By now, children have been born to this new society, and they're becoming teenagers and are developing minds of their own. Though they've endured cruelty all their childhood, the teens aren't defeated by it. They're smoldering in it. Defiance sparks inside them and they begin to defy the regime, infiltrate it and eventually try to undo it.
Dystopian novels "take a current fear and push it hard to come out with a world where everything is as bad as a writer can imagine," according to Tor.com, a website about science fiction and fantasy books. "They have a shape of story, in which somebody accepts their world as the way the world is and then comes to reconsider, question and learn deeper truths about it, and then attempt to change it."
That's heavy stuff. So why are teens devouring it -- why, to borrow a title from The Hunger Games, is it catching fire? (That's of course the name of the second book in Suzanne Collin's phenomenally popular trilogy about a particularly bloody post-apocalyptic society in
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