Parenthetical

A friend just shared with me the art of Thomas Doyle, which I share with you because every sculpture I click on has me writing a new twisted YA post-apocalyptic/dystopian novel in my head. For instance, this. Or oh god, this. Sometimes they’re zombie novels. Yeesh.

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Maybe Genius is really hitting it out of the park today (and by “today” I mean “the day I picked to catch up on my last month of feeds”). Here’s a handy list of dystopian tropes. I’m thinking about using it to create Dystopian Bingo. Would you play with me? A couple of favorite bits: [...]

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Paolo Bacigalupi (Ship Breaker) is interviewed in School Library Journal this month: “Master of Disaster”. He talks about his take on the now-trendy post-apocalyptic genre. Reading the interview I had the unsettling feeling that he stole the kind of thoughts that are churning around in my brain all the time and used them as interview [...]

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Rose’s parents, the heads of the most powerful corporation in the universe, have put her in stasis periodically her whole life. Usually just for a few months, but it adds up — her best friend Xavier, who was born when she was 7, eventually caught up in age and became her boyfriend. But then Rose [...]

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…or not, depending on how the contributors read the question. The introduction to the NYTimes article “The Dark Side of Young Adult Fiction” seems to equate “dark” with “dystopian.” This lead some authors to lump Harry Potter and Graveyard Book in with Hunger Games as “dark” books, while others focused on dystopias specifically. It’s a [...]

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3 out of 5 Before Kellen was born, the world was on the brink of nuclear war, followed by a terrible plague that wiped out most of the planet’s men but stopped the war. His father, a teenage boy at the time, survived, along with a handful of others in isolated pockets. Now Kellen is [...]

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After the discussion of trilogies (and Martini-Corona’s eternal John Christopher obsession), I decided this project wouldn’t be complete without a Tripod book. The Tripod trilogy (…heh) might have been the first major YA science fiction trilogy, and is certainly a classic. If you somehow missed these books, the premise is that aliens invade, in giant [...]

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Apocalypse how? Aliens. The Clordians didn’t want to compete with humans for habitable planets to colonize, so they wiped us out. The Clordian Sweep “rapid[ly] disintegrat[ed]… all carbon compounds, which destroyed all life.” (Not to mention all paper records of knowledge, all wooden structures… the thoroughness of this destruction is impressive.) Some people, plants, and [...]

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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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In Children of Morrow, we meet Tia and Rabbit, slightly deformed (and oh P.S. telepathic) outcast children in a post-apocalyptic village. The primitive village grew out of a military base, worships a dead nuclear warhead, is patriarchal to a degree that would make Margaret Atwood blush at the crass obviousness of it all, and generally [...]

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