In The Not-So-Distant Future

There has been a trend in Young Adult fiction in recent years, where “dystopian future” storylines seem to be en vogue, particularly in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy genres…honestly, I don’t get it. Not only does everybody know by now that these tropes are thinly-veiled references to present-day politics, but there is enough freedom of speech in the first world that people can try going straight for the source: why not a “dystopian present” novel?

 

Science Fiction is not the creative frontier it once was. Notice how there hasn’t been a new Star Trek series since Enterprise, which went off the air almost a decade ago (the J.J. Abram’s reboots notwithstanding, as both were essentially remakes of The Wrath of Khan)? There is nothing left of this genre to explore or expand upon, which is made obvious in the formulaic approach taken to many (if not all) “dystopian future” stories these days:

 

• A “bread and circuses” style government that throws elements of socialist utopia (government-issued property, food, etc.) and magical technology at its citizens to distract them from blatant civil rights violations, usually (if not always) involving some sort of caste system: class warfare, arranged marriages, government-issued career “choices,” and so on.
• A teenage girl, towing the line of womanhood, who is somehow made aware that all is not well in Pleasant Valley (why it’s never a guy, I’m not sure – probably because most guys are oblivious to those sorts of things, hence the stereotype that conservatives are all white, upper-class, Protestant males).
• Some kind of love triangle between the female protagonist and two equally-but-separately undesirable men, though the heroine stays celibate to the bitter end (and eventually chooses one of the two).
• A disproportionate level of death and destruction to put a mere dent in the government’s policies.

 

The three series I draw this formula from the most are Matched, The Hunger Games, and Divergent, all of which are essentially interchangeable with each other. I did enjoy The Hunger Games books, but if you’ve read one of the aforementioned series, you’ve read them all. Instead, I propose that people start writing about their own current, respective dystopian societies, from present-day perspectives. Think about it – the United States alone has plenty of source material:

 

• Advanced technology
• Obamacare, while seen as a Godsend to many who voted in favor of it, actually forces those who fall through the cracks (such as single household members who didn’t qualify for Medicaid but can’t afford Obamacare right after graduating from community college that a grant paid for, i.e., me) onto Medicaid without destigmatizing the latter government assistance
• Haves vs. Have Nots, class warfare, etc.
• Racial/ethnic issues are still a thing, though largely related to social class and SES
• There are still GLBT issues in some of the hick states
• Stuff about the NSA
• Social networking and cyberbullying

 

The list goes on, and yet writers tend to fall into the same patterns and tropes. Though to play devil’s advocate, this could be the publisher’s fault, which is a common problem in high school literature textbooks in the US as well. Still, there seems to be a stigma enforced by society against people who don’t enjoy reading for leisure, and if they want their way, they can at least make it easy for skeptical people to enjoy dystopian fiction.

U.S. Literature: Social Engineering at its Finest.

I made this a long time ago after me and one of my sisters were talking about what’s in American high school literature textbooks, and I stand by it.

I really do wonder if the ethnic literature that gets popular in the United States is a legitimate portrayal of ethnic culture, or if it’s just the stuff white people want us to think about other races – for example, everything of Hispanic descent is usually some fractured English account of what it’s like to live in the barrio (Sandra Cisneros) or magical realism (Gabriel García Márquez). In fact, pretty much anything Hispanic-related in the media kind of follows that trend…the only entertainment media featuring Hispanic characters that don’t follow the Spanish-every-other-word/three-generation household/soccer (football) playing stereotypes are the works of Jhonen Vasquez and Dragon Tales. It annoys me to no end – I’m (half) Hispanic, and I don’t even speak Spanish, and I’m sure Portugal and Brazil understand where I’m coming from as well. (Also, a Note to the Media: if you’re going to portray a character as being overly-bilingual, they speak Spanish with a few random English words thrown in, not the other way around. Do your homework. At least, this is what I’m accustomed to in my Southern California community, so I’m not just pulling stereotypes out of my ass on this one.)

And then there’s all the African-American literature that’s basically a civil rights soap opera, often featuring father-on-daughter incest…granted, The Color Purple is one of my favorite books ever, and I always thought it was more about gender than race, but it seems like a lot of African-American literature deals with these themes. I don’t think that this is all that black culture has to offer the literary world by any means – I think that this is what Americana has cherry-picked to represent it.

The same goes for most Asian-American literature (or rather, Chinese- and Japanese-American, since according to American literature, those must be the only two countries in Asia), which either deal with oppression in the homeland or how much it sucks to be living in San Francisco with traditional home values. While that’s one take on life as an Asian-American, it’d be nice to see what the newer generations have to say about their experiences, and it’d be nice if they started putting stories by Koreans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Filipinos, and other Asian/Pacific Islander writers into high school textbooks.

Most other races/ethnicities/nationalities (Native American, etc.) are lucky to get so much as a poem in the back of the McGraw-Hill textbook, as the largest portion that’s not Shakespeare is taken up by Starbucks’ bathroom reader fodder. Ironically, many of these writers are gay or bisexual – or maybe not ironically, since the goal behind these textbooks seems to be to make minorities look bad to suburbanite teenagers. Many of these stories are appointed some pretentious “higher meaning” in symbolism for its time period, and if you actually take the time to Wiki the authors in the textbook, you’ll find that most of them think that these fan-based speculations are horseshit. Meanwhile, modern young adult literature like The Hunger Games gets written off (as it were) as being some kind of flash-in-the-pan pop-culture story despite being a very accurate portrayal of the negative impacts of war and consumerism in American society, among other things.

That being said about modern literature, for anyone who complains about Bella and Edward’s relationship in the Twilight series…that is a relationship. That kind of instability was how every single girl at my high school who married their sweetheart right after graduation came across to me. Hell, that’s exactly how my first marriage (at age 19) was. Anyone who gets involved that young without having much prior experience is going to end up like that. If they replaced any of the Shakespeare plays in the literature books with Twilight, teachers would be explaining all the “hidden depth” in Meyers’ writing while idiot teen girls would be crying, “I want a relationship like Hamlet and Ophelia!” But the best thing about Shakespeare isn’t his iambic pentameter, but all the clever double entendres that nobody else in class ever seemed to notice but me. (“Country Matters” for the win!)

TL;DR: American literature cherry-picks what is acceptable in shaping social norms, creating bizarre stereotypes through process of omission.

[Originally posted on Tumblr]