Parenthetical.net

Sorry it’s been awhile. Fortunately the 7th grade trip to New York was not apocalyptic in the slightest. Anyway, speaking of New York, it’s the setting of today’s old-school apocalypse! In the future, everyone lives in vast suburban Tracts in little boxes made of ticky-tacky. All Cities have been evacuated and sealed, deemed too filthy [...]

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A group of bad-ass teen criminals get kicked off Earth to be the lead team of colonizers of the planet Klydor. If they die, eh, no harm done. If they survive, ColSec — Colonization Section, part of the massive government that runs Earth — shows up to claim a nicely broken-in planet. There are giant [...]

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All Amy knows is the endless corridors and grimy roach-infested apartments of the city. She’s marked as a possible troublemaker because she knows how to read, but if she keeps her head down and makes enough deliberate mistakes on the school vids, maybe they’ll send her to a training dorm to learn a trade. Until [...]

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Last month I wrote a lot about apocalypses and dystopias, a perennial favorite topic here in Parenthetical-land. Those posts, and Presenting Lenore’s Dystopian February, inspired my own theme month:
Welcome to Old-School Apocalypse April!
I’ve been re-reading some childhood favorites from my YA Apocalypse Bookshelf (yes, I really have such a thing). Some hold up brilliantly, some [...]

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One last piece of dystopiana: Research Reveals That Apocalyptic Stories Changed Dramatically 20 Years Ago.
Chanda Phelan wrote this article based on her thesis, for which she looked at a ton of apocalyptic literature from 1826 to 2007 and charted the nature of the apocalypse. Click the image at the top of the article for a [...]

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Post-apocalyptic and/or dystopian fiction! It’s: a) pretty much all I read as an adolescent, b) what made the hippie I am today, c) ridiculously popular all of a sudden in YA lit, or d) all of the above?
D, obviously. The YA lit world is exploding with talk of dystopias. This article from [...]

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This is the second book in the Chaos Walking trilogy, the sequel to The Knife of Never Letting Go. The last 150 pages were separated by a work day for me, and it was possibly the least productive day ever. I should’ve just finished the damn thing at the circ desk, except that [...]

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Oof. Just when you think this story has gotten as fucked up as it can possibly get… it gets worse. Over and over. And I do mean that in the best possible way: The Hunger Games is one of the most intense, intelligent books I’ve read in a long time, and I [...]

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Sadly, this post isn’t really about the intersection of those things. (Though if you can think of one, I know a few people who’d want to read it!) I’m just smooshing these two links into one post:
Eldritchhobbit at the LJ community YALitLovers has posted a lengthy list of YA dystopias. (I’ve read [...]

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Marcus and his too-smart-for-their-own-good punk friends are in the wrong place at a very wrong time — the destruction of the San Francisco Bay Bridge by terrorists. They get picked up by Homeland Security, taken to a secret detention facility, and abused. This experience focuses Marcus’s teen rebellion and, upon his release, he [...]

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