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  • Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers ed. by Carrie Hintz, Balaka Basu, Katherine R. Broad
  • Jennifer M. Miskec (bio)
Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers. Edited by Carrie Hintz , Balaka Basu , and Katherine R. Broad . New York : Routledge , 2013 .

The 2015 Modern Language Association annual conference will host a panel on dystopian literature for teens, for which chair June Cummins asks, “Why Dystopia YA Literature? Why now?” The same query drives this edited collection of essays dedicated to a critical exploration of the publishing trend as “political, cultural, and aesthetic phenomenon” (9). Both forums investigate the sometimes conflicting projects of YA literature and the dystopia genre: hope for the future versus a rather bleak worldview. In Basu, Broad, and Hintz’s collection, [End Page 442] contributors explore how both education and escape coexist in YA dystopia; postapocalyptic narratives, stories of environmental destruction, and the results of unchecked conformity, technology, and political power all serve as locations of anxiety that “teach serious lessons about the issues faced by humanity, and [offer] readers a pleasurable retreat from their quotidian experience” (5).

The tension between education and escape is attended to throughout the collection, where fears for the future—in the introduction, the editors repeat John Green’s quip that what the recent burst of dystopic literature for teens tells about the future is that it’s “gonna be bad”—are, unsurprisingly, redeemed or even undermined by more traditional values. For example, in part 1, “Freedom and Constraint: Adolescent Liberty and Self-Determination,” Balaka Basu considers identity politics in the first article, “What Faction Are You In? The Pleasure of Being Sorted in Veronica Roth’s Divergent.” She examines how the series perpetuates the idea of an essential self. According to Basu, the book depicts as problematic not the existence of a system dedicated to discovering individuals’ real selves—so that “identities may no longer be so alarmingly fluid”—but rather how people have used this system toward nefarious ends. Also, in “Coming of Age in Dystopia: Reading Genre in Holly Black’s Curse Workers Series,” Emily Lauer contends that while the series seems to come from a place of Randian critique of enforced equality, Black’s tale might extend beyond those parameters and instead offer an interesting vision of the dystopic bildungsroman. According to Lauer, “Black’s trilogy proves it is possible to be politically progressive in a dystopian setting even if the government bug-bear you are facing down happens to be one envisioned to scare right-wing children rather than left-wing ones” (37). Next, Carissa Turner Smith’s “Embodying the Postmetropolis in Catherine Fisher’s Incarceron and Sapphique” discusses the influence of space and surveillance in behavior and identity formation.

In part 2, “Society and Environment: Building a Better World,” Alexa Weik Von Mossner uses Raffaella Baccolini’s concept of “critical ecodystopia” to consider the “political process driven by hope and desire” (71) in “Hope in Dark Times: Climate Change and the World Risk Society in Saci Lloyd’s The Carbon Diaries 2015 and 2017.” Then, Claire P. Curtis compares two opposing ideals of postapocalyptic community building—the first encouraging the teen protagonist to limit her desires, the second to desire otherwise—in “Educating Desire, Choosing Justice? Susan Beth Pfeffer’s Last Survivors Series and Julie Bertagna’s Exodus.” Elaine Ostry’s “On the Brink: The Role of Young Adult Culture in Environmental Degradation” offers an exploration of how teen readers are encouraged to “rethink their approach to both nature and technology, confront the role of young adult culture in environmental disaster, and through these processes, grow up” (102). Ostry argues that Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies, Julie Bertagna’s Exodus series, and M. T. Anderson’s Feed all, though differently, [End Page 443] “honor[] the ability of readers to realize that there are no easy answers to the problems we face,” and that they must “reassess their attitudes” to avoid the fates presented in the novels (111).

Gender, race, and literacy are the focus of part 3, “Radical or Conservative: Polemics of the Future,” beginning with Katherine R. Broad’s “‘The Dandelion in the Spring’: Utopia as Romance in Suzanne Collins...

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