Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers ed. by Balaka Basu (review)

Here it comes…Wait for it…News flash: dystopian fiction is in. Firmly franchised now in the movie industry, it has been a distinct, important aspect of YA literature almost from the creation of the genre. So, it should not be a surprise that academic research about dystopia’s connection to YAL and especially its connection to what it means to be a teenager should be on the upswing. And this is, without doubt, a good thing.

At a most opportune time, riding the current crest of dystopianism now sweeping the publishing world, Hollywood and TV, Routledge has published Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers (I really do wish that the title had been reversed) as part of their Children’s Literature and Culture series. Composed of twelve scholarly essays (each extremely well researched and documented), the book is organized into four distinct parts: “Freedom and Constraint: Adolescent Liberty and Self-Determination”; “Society and Environment: Building a Better World”; “Radical or Conservative? Polemics of the Future”; and “Biotechnologies of the Self: Humanity in a Posthuman Age.” From the range of these four evocative thematic sections one can see that the editors of the book, Balaka Basu, Katherine R. Broad, and Carrie Hintz, have thought deeply about how to cover the topic of Dystopian YAL.

Their introduction to the book is extremely informative, providing an excellent examination of how YA dystopian writing “engages with pressing global concerns” (1). They manage to be upbeat and idealistic about a literary genre that is often the opposite. They do this by demonstrating how “didacticism and escape have a role to play in the reception and impact of the YA dystopian genre” (6). They speak with hope, noting that by reading YA dystopias “adolescents can at once fit themselves to better meet society’s demands and shape society to better reflect their own desires and goals, creating the world they need, the world they want, and they world that they deserve” (6). It’s a tall order; I hope they are right.

The first section of this collection, the editors note, “considers how the generic conventions of YA, dystopian, and utopian literature impact the construction of the adolescent self in relation to the social collective” (9). Balaka Basu’s essay, “What Faction Are You in: The Pleasure of Being Sorted in Veronica Roth’s Divergent,” concerns itself with “this troubling understanding of identity.” As she addresses Roth’s “impulse to categorize identities into definitive groups” (9), she reads the condition of divergence “as the ability to overcome externally imposed control through the exercise of free will” (25). Basu examines Roth’s implications for identity in the novel and concludes, interestingly, that Roth’s claim for the impulse behind the novel (stated in an interview) “seems extraordinarily conservative in a post-Foucauldian age” (31), while simultaneously seeing the novel as a kind of celebration of group membership. In “Coming of Age in Dystopia: Reading Genre in Holly Black’s Curse Workers Series,” Emily Lauer’s essay, the author tells us “perhaps we need to rethink what it means to come of age under dystopian conditions” (37). She suggests that reading this trilogy “may require an acceptance of dystopian conditions” (37). She notes that the “limitations to workers’ quality of life, as imposed by the dystopian elements of Cassel’s world . . . cause many of his personal problems, both directly and indirectly” (39). Lauer also connects the trilogy to the classic idea of the bildungsroman as the main character’s personal growth determines his place in the dystopian world. She notes that the character’s “eventual awareness . . . is shaping his own future as growth of agency from childhood to adulthood” (46). So Lauer concludes that this trilogy, while dystopian in nature, portrays an adolescent who “takes his rightful place in society and the form of that society is conserved” (47). As the editors point out regarding the third and final essay...