While everyone is fussing about the Apocalypse or Doomsday about to happen (as they say) this December 21, I couldn't just literally hate the idea of it all. Why? Simply because if these false prophecies didn't exist, I couldn't imagine how my reading life would be without dystopian novels. From YA best-selling novels The Hunger Games, Julianna Baggott's The Pure, Shatter Me, Matched and The Giver, all fall under the same setting, dystopia.
But what is dystopia in the first place? Dystopia, or the word itself, literally came from two Ancient Greek words: δυσ-, "bad, hard", and τόπος, "place, landscape". According to Wikipedia, "it can alternatively be called cacotopia or anti-utopia." It is the counterpart of utopia, wherein instead of the community being built into a desirable atmosphere, the dystopia is a community or society that is built in an undesirable and frightening setting.
The term was originally coined by Thomas More in the book he wrote in 1516. The first known use of the word itself, recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary, was during the speech given by John Stuart Mill in the year 1968 as he described the Irish government land policy:
"It is, perhaps, too complimentary to call them Utopians, they ought rather to be called dys-topians, or caco-topians. What is commonly called Utopian is something too good to be practicable; but what they appear to favour is too bad to be practicable."
Dystopia in literature, for the meantime, have garnered readers and fans as writers incorporate their plot into an exciting theme of an imperfect world, already filled with sorrow, destruction, and hopelessness, new heroes and protagonists emerges with deep characteristics and fully-molded starting backgrounds as complications arises adding up to their already grim-world.
One of the most popular YA dystopian novels in the present time is Suzanne Collin's The Hunger Games, a story set in a post-war dystopian North-America called Panem, which is composed of an extravagant, commanding capital (The Capitol) and twelve poverty-stricken districts that each specialize in making a certain type of products.They have a totalitarian government that forces each district to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen each year to fight to the death in the Hunger Games.
Unknown to many though, the story actually bloomed in its writer's mind Suzanne Collins while watching television and searching for something to watch: "On one channel she observed people competing on a reality show and on another she saw footage of the invasion of Iraq. The two "began to blur in this very unsettling way" and the idea for the book was formed," according toWikipedia.
Collins' childhood also played role in the book, when her father went to service during the Vietnam War and died: "Collins stated that the deaths of young characters and other "dark passages" were the most difficult parts of the book to write, but that she had accepted that passages such as these were necessary to the story."
Dystopia, as we all know it, may be an interesting approach and theme to read to keep us entertain and provide us with a whole new adventure and creepy setups, but is not something we should all enjoy to ever dream of living in. And though a lot are enjoying the Doomsday trend going endless throughout the internet, may we reflect to ourself, that the world can't be destroy in a second without a Great Force intervening, and instead of joking about the whole thing, why don't we take time to see that the world is already being destroyed.. and it will soon be gone, soon be turned into a dystopia, if we don't stop the wars, the pollution and the social issues that are all tearing us apart.
And as a fellow writer and friend, who's also writing a dystopian novel, I could only hope that we see the lesson through the dystopian novels we have read, that after the darkness, there is a light waiting ahead of us, if we're just strong enough to fight for it and run to it.
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