WTFuture?: Teens on Post-Apocalyptic Fiction
Posted by: Misha Stone
Piggybacking on Neil’s recent “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” post, and my book group’s recent readings of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Jose Saramago’s Blindness, I have also noticed that post-apocalyptic fiction is all the rage.
Our Teen Center Advisors and Teen Librarians recently weighed in on the trend. They had some very interesting things to say about it, and the article includes a nice “Dystopian Book Club” list.
December 24th, 2008 at 12:02 am
the latest issue of reason takes this issue on as well:
http://www.reason.com/news/show/130358.html
which gives a compelling idea of why it is such a popular framing device and why many people keep going back to it as readers. It displays real tragedy on the visceral physical, not only emotional, level:
“Not cheap accidental tragedy, but the real kind, the inevitable, ironic kind where the hero gets disabused of his illusions in the instant after he is ruined.”
There is also much talk in the scifi community about how the coming change in the political world will effect the grow of the “genre”.