Dystopia in the past life
I thought I was reading a different genre.
Honestly, I feel old. Remember when chick lit was all the rage? In the early 2000s, I remember an explosion of working female readers voraciously consuming novels like The Devil’s wears Prada and The Shopaholic series left and right. Of course, this trend has taken itself to the next level by mutating into the erotica literature that sits on the best sellers lists today. I honestly tried reading the first book in the 50 shades of gray series — I simply couldn’t bring myself to finish the thing. For one, it’s easy to decide what kind of literature you don’t like, rather than picking a genre that is your favorite.
Then the Vampire Mania came along. The Sookie Stackhouse series and the Twilight books came upon us like the flood. I have nothing against people who like to read these things. I mean, Vampires aren’t a new concept. Anne Rice wrote tons of that stuff way before this fad came along, but somehow when you’ve been picking up popular mass paperbacks you’d get a whiff of the tide of the times. Vampires sell these days, so publishers churn out these titles like Foxconn does iPhones. There’s a certain pattern going on here.
However, the most recent fashion in Novel writing today is that of the Hunger Games genre. I have been riding the waves of the Dystopian Trilogies in the Young Adult Genre. The most recent books I’ve been reading have been, unintentionally Dystopian. After a few books, I could have sworn that in the past life people used to call Dystopia as Science Fiction.
My reading patterns have been driven by “Must Read” Lists, lately by the bookish blogs and social reading network recommendations around me. This is a whole other topic on discovering books you would like to read, but the trend now is that they tend to point me these days towards Dystopian Worlds. I seriously suspect that the young adult trilogies drive these lists towards the trend. Dystopia sells like cray nowadays.
I wanted to get into Science Fiction. Let’s face it. When people ask us what we read during our formative reading years we wish we could say something sophisticated like Tolstoy or Fitzgerald. But Alas, when you’re young, you pick up whatever the hell is within arm’s reach. My family wasn’t particularly fond of books, but I took a liking to it somehow even with very little access to books. I remember picking up a book called “Banana Robbers” once. If someone were to ask me “what was your most memorable summer read?” it would be that. I mean, that’s really the most memorable book I’ve read when I was young. Then I can cheat a little and say I read Pride and Prejudice some years after that.
With the progression of my life into a technical profession I started getting interested in SciFi in other forms of Media, but surprisingly I never read any. So I set out to find my first Science Fiction Book. The first ever I got was the audio book recommended by Neil Gaiman, called A Dimension of Miracles, written by Robert Sheckley, in 1968. It’s an old book, I know. But it was awesome to read (and listen). I honestly worry about these social reading networks how they never recommend me these kinds of books and why they don’t get quite enough exposure, but perhaps it’s because I haven’t got any decent science fiction in my reading lists yet. That said, after adding that to my library I moved on to Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s end, published in 1953 (well that’s even older) and found it to be surprisingly entertaining, and being reminded of the feelings I had when I was reading Lois Lowry’s The Giver. Progression of the human race to Utopia seems to amount to what Science Fiction was saying since a long time ago. But maybe that’s just me.
I suppose Science Fiction has a definition too rigid to be completely Dystopian, but the ideas that play around in my head when reading these genres are the same. It’s kind of crazy how you notice these kinds of patterns after you’ve read a ton of books.
I think it’s fair to say that Dystopian readers would find the Science Fiction genre to be quite appealing. I say, don’t pay too much attention to the stereotypes that float to the surface when you hear about Science Fiction and the sort of people who read these stuff. (Hey, the same goes for Vampire Literature or even Erotic Literature. Every genre has their reader stereotypes) But what I’m saying is that the ideas that play around Dystopian worlds and Science Fiction are eerily close. I sincerely hope there’d be a trend for Science Fiction for Publishing one day in the same way there is for Dystopia now. Like, something that explodes into the mainstream as the Hunger Games did. Science Fiction need not be too intimidating with all those convoluted Physics and Space Flight concepts to be appealing to the young adult.
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