Teen Dystopia Is the Latest Craze

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A couple of days ago Marian brought home a copy of The Hunger Games, so I read it. For someone steeped in a lifetime of science fiction, it didn’t really strike me as anything special. Man, the ultimate prey! Fine. Still, I get that it’s a book for teenagers, and obviously they aren’t as jaded by the basic plot device as I am. No harm, no foul.

But what I didn’t realize is that The Hunger Games has apparently unleashed a whole new genre. Abby McGanney Nolan explains:

Like the flu virus, the genre of dystopic novels for young adults has many strains. The one featuring a teenage girl battling for her life got a massive boost in the fall of 2008, when the first volume of Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy was published.

….Why have readers been so drawn to catastrophic futures when the present seems troubled enough? Why are young heroines thrust into ruined worlds and then routinely hunted, harassed, or beaten into unconsciousness?….While The Hunger Games begins in Appalachia, three more recent dystopias, Marie Lu’s Legend, Veronica Roth’s Divergent, and Moira Young’s Blood Red Road (all the first of trilogies, optioned by the likes of Ridley Scott and the producers of Twilight), rise up out of, respectively, Los Angeles, Chicago, and the American flatlands that have been reduced to a second Dust Bowl. In each case, the teenage-girl narrator has grown up sheltered in a zone of relative comfort. Her troubles multiply as society’s flaws are revealed to her and she must fight for survival and the safety of her family.

It doesn’t actually surprise me all that much that teenage girls, a demographic practically defined by angst, would find these kinds of narratives appealing. If you think the world is heartless and authoritarian, what’s not to like about a fictional world where a teenage girl fights and beats an establishment that’s heartless and authoritarian? Seems like a natural.

In any case, since I’m not a teenage girl, I think I’ll skip the rest of these books. Right now I just have to decide whether to bother reading the rest of the Hunger Games trilogy. Pros: it will only take a few hours and I’ll be acquainted with yet another segment of pop culture. Cons: Sort of obvious. Any advice from my readers? Should I bother with books two and three?

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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