BUY NOW This young adult dystopian novel has all the elements you would expect from the genre: an advanced society with different classes of citizens, limited education, a highly regulated and tightly controlled life style with limited personal freedom, and a protagonist who begins to discover that what they thought was a pretty good life is not as it seems. The world of The Amplified is one where at a certain age people have the right to become Amplified by a small plate fixed to their brain behind their ear. When they give it instructions, this device amplifies their abilities making them almost super-human, but, as in any good dystopian novel, amplification comes at a price. There is a device that overrides individual instructions and makes the person follow orders that are supposedly only used when the protection of the realm requires a co-ordinated effort that is beyond what could be taught and perfected in the time available. It sounds like a valid reason, but it makes our … [Read more...]
Fascinating Dystioian fiction: ‘Future Prometheus: Emergence & Evolution’ by J.M Erickson
Future Prometheus: Emergence & Evolution by J.M Erickson is a fascinating dystopian story about a world after a virus has sent all sexually active men on a violent rampage that ends up with most of them, and a large proportion of the female and child population, dead. The events in the book occur 140 years after this event and follow Melendez, a soldier, who, along with some APs (androids) wishes to re-establish a society based on the values of the old USA. He's been in stasis in a cyrogenic tank since the disaster, though he was supposed to be under for only four months. A group of androids find him and bring him back. They become his friends, and he develops a program to bring them to sentience and eventually to sapience. He finds himself in a matriarchal, lesbian society. The women keep their boy children only long enough to harvest their sperm when they reach maturity, after which the women take them outside their megastate and kill them. Some girls are also discarded - the … [Read more...]
A rare book I can’t fault: Waning Moon by P.J Sharon: YA Dystopian.
Waning Moon is simply excellent, a rare book that I can't fault. It's set in the future in a small town outside of Albany after a virus has killed a large part of the earth's population. The cities are run by a Dystopian government. If you stay in the town, you get fed, clothed and have access to medical care, but you do what the governments wants. Those who live outside the cities choose freedom over security. Lily, her brother and her uncle, Sam, live well camouflaged in the forest. They have to stay away from the authorities because Lily and her little brother have genetic modifications that make them very useful to the authorities. Lily can heal and her brother can kill with a touch - or two, or three. Those living outside the cities have to occasionally travel to markets inside the city to trade for the things they can't provide for themselves and the story begins with Lily preparing to take such a trip. A few days before she is about to leave, she finds another teen fallen in … [Read more...]
Excellent YA Dystopian: Deviation by Christine Manzari
The idea of genetically modified teens being used as weapons is not a new idea. Kimberley Kinrade wrote a series on this theme some time ago, and I've read quite a few YA books recently about teens with genetic modifications. It's not surprising since genetic modification for humans is emerging as a very real possibility in our society, and I expect we will see more fiction in this vein. Although it shares many overly common elements of YA fantasy, for example a new school, a supposedly bad boy that is hard to resist, and the resident bully who seems to need little inspiration for their nastiness, Deviation is still an excellent, well-crafted story that keeps you hooked in and has a surprising twist at the end that leaves the story nicely set up for sequels. I think this book will be well enjoyed by YA speculative fiction fans. Cleo lives in a world of the future where terrorism has made huge scars on the American people and cities. She is a sophisticate, someone genetically … [Read more...]
Fiction with meaning
In a recent post I talked about literature as being not so much a genre as a description of quality within a genre. I based that post on the Concise Oxford Dictionary definition of literature, but the term is also often used to refer to writing that has some sort of meaning, often a social, political or spiritual comment. Literature is thought to raise issues and that’s one of the reasons why people like to use the term literature as something separate to popular fiction which often does make no attempt to impart meaning. However, just because some popular fiction doesn’t impart meaning doesn’t mean that all popular fiction is devoid of meaning, or that lack of meaning is necessarily a mark of the category. Take The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. You could consider it literary young adult dystopian because despite what you may think of it personally it is well written it has a powerful emotional effect on readers it makes a political statement The political statement gives … [Read more...]
