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You are here: Home / Politics / Media / Everything is falling apart

Everything is falling apart

by Tim F|  March 18, 20124:21 pm| 49 Comments

This post is in: Media, Popular Culture

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I started high school around 1990, when the standard way for a miserable teenager to express himself fell somwhere between modern emo and a John Cusack movie. At one point I had so miserabilism swirling around my belly button (where my head spent most of its time) that I had to get it out somehow, so I wrote a short story about the last shark swimming around a polluted ocean after an environmental apocalypse. It ends when he gets hauled in by a long line boat. I sent it to the school lit mag but mostly I just had to get a little bit of the black cloud of doom out of my head and onto paper.

All of that means to say that I can understand a bit if post-apocalypse stories resonate with the teenage set.

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49Comments

  1. 1.

    dogwood

    March 18, 2012 at 4:28 pm

    Is this The Hunger Games thread?

  2. 2.

    Bnut

    March 18, 2012 at 4:28 pm

    When I had surgery after an accident and spent 3 months in a bed, I would write poetry to my gf when on painkillers. She is now an ex (but still a friend), and will sometimes email some of the garbage I wrote just to fuck with me.

  3. 3.

    Raven

    March 18, 2012 at 4:29 pm

    Alas Babylon is what we read.

  4. 4.

    Baud

    March 18, 2012 at 4:30 pm

    So what explains Twilight?

  5. 5.

    BGinCHI

    March 18, 2012 at 4:31 pm

    @Baud: You see, Baud, when the sun gets near the horizon at the end of the day….

    /Mitt Romney on Literature

  6. 6.

    Baud

    March 18, 2012 at 4:33 pm

    @BGinCHI: Nice try, but Mitt Romney would never use science to explain anything while he’s running for the GOP nom.

  7. 7.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    March 18, 2012 at 4:34 pm

    @Baud: Bland ids.

  8. 8.

    c u n d gulag

    March 18, 2012 at 4:37 pm

    My comment disappeared?

    Oh well, you can all now wonder at what amazing word-turds I was going to drop here today. :-)

  9. 9.

    Ben Franklin

    March 18, 2012 at 4:37 pm

    Everyone is hungry for a new thread. This ain’t it.

  10. 10.

    BGinCHI

    March 18, 2012 at 4:38 pm

    @Baud: Ironic for a machine.

  11. 11.

    Peter

    March 18, 2012 at 4:40 pm

    I’m all for a good post-apocalyptic story, but The Hunger Games isn’t it. It’s rife with inconsistencies, protagonist-centered morality, and clear signs that the author didn’t bother with five minute of research.

  12. 12.

    Arm The Homeless

    March 18, 2012 at 4:41 pm

    I really can’t remember reading ‘YA’ lit. I remember going from Bunnicula into Orwell and Wheel of Time between 8th and 9th grade.

    But, it does make me stop and think about what I was looking for in a book at that point. I found Vonnegut and Orwell very quenching, perhaps for the same reason that kids are looking for them today, but have more media to access at this moment in time.

  13. 13.

    Yutsano

    March 18, 2012 at 4:42 pm

    Only a few years before that we were all convinced we were gonna get nuked by Russkies anyway. I think this explains a lot about 80’s fashion.

  14. 14.

    Betty Cracker

    March 18, 2012 at 4:48 pm

    I’m reading the Hunger Games series since my kiddo is reading them. I’ve finished the first. I can see why it appeals to teens, but great lit it is not…

  15. 15.

    Baud

    March 18, 2012 at 4:49 pm

    I listened to the Hunger Games series on audiobook. The woman who narrates it is really good.

  16. 16.

    CaseyL

    March 18, 2012 at 4:51 pm

    @Yutsano: A friend of mine said exactly the same thing, and she said it while we were still in the 1980s. We’d look around at the artfully torn, off-the-shoulder sweatshirts, highly distressed leggings, and chain-belted parachute pants and Sherri’d describe it as Post-Atomic Holocaust Chic.

  17. 17.

    Yutsano

    March 18, 2012 at 4:55 pm

    @CaseyL: That sounds about right. And I wore primary colours and Levi jeans just because, well, I could. Pastels still make me ill to this day. And do NOT get me started on the colour pink.

  18. 18.

    farmette

    March 18, 2012 at 5:00 pm

    Great dystopia novel – Parable Of The Sower – by Octavia Butler.

  19. 19.

    ruemara

    March 18, 2012 at 5:09 pm

    @farmette: This is the only dystopic novel I would recommend to teens. And frankly, the way things are going, who says apocalypse is just for teens? Us adults have fox news.

  20. 20.

    MariedeGournay

    March 18, 2012 at 5:16 pm

    @farmette: A great one. I finally read Mary Shelley’s “The Last Man.” Now that’s how you bury a literary movement.

  21. 21.

    Brachiator

    March 18, 2012 at 5:16 pm

    @Peter:

    I’m all for a good post-apocalyptic story, but The Hunger Games isn’t it. It’s rife with inconsistencies, protagonist-centered morality, and clear signs that the author didn’t bother with five minute of research.

    How do you research the post-apocalypse?

    I often thought of the Wizard of Oz as a post-apocalypse story.

    I’m reading the Hunger Games series since my kiddo is reading them. I’ve finished the first. I can see why it appeals to teens, but great lit it is not…

    I don’t think that great lit exists anymore, or that anyone much cares. The triumph of pop culture in America means that only basic entertainment value, and profitability, counts.

  22. 22.

    Sad Iron

    March 18, 2012 at 5:32 pm

    I have to say, all of the “adults” talking about what those darn kids see in The Hunger Games is getting really annoying. I’ve read the books twice and taught them in a class for college freshman–one thing all of the students identified with was pretty relevant and, well, obvious: terrible government by the mature adults makes people’s lives miserable.

  23. 23.

    celticdragonchick

    March 18, 2012 at 5:39 pm

    Great lit?

    I’m not sure what that even means. The Hunger Games is science fiction, and like most good science fiction, it serves as a critique of social problems in society at the time it is written. The 1% vs the 99%? Yep. War as “reality show” entertainment? Check.

    That is just to start with. (spoilers)

    Personally, I think the third book(Mockingjay)should be considered actual military science fiction, especially as Katniss becomes a squad leader in the middle of a Falujah-style urban combat nightmare. Collins does not get into technical weapon details or descriptions like Heinlein or Haldeman, but that is not her focus since she concentrates on how the experience changes Katniss (and not for the better…)

    You see just what war and systematic brutalization does to people…Katniss and Peta in particular…and you see what physical and emotional scars they are left with. There is no sugar coated happy ending. Instead, Collins wants her audience to realize that war has a very, very high price, including the necessary wars that cannot be avoided. This is something that the “entertained” tween set could stand to learn.

  24. 24.

    dogwood

    March 18, 2012 at 5:40 pm

    @Betty Cracker:

    I taught high school until recently and my students talked me into reading the series. I too see why young people like the books, but you’re right, it ain’t great lit. One thing I will say in its favor is that it terms of the romance in the text, it moves away from the stock good girl loves bad boy crap you see in a lot of YA lit. In this series the heroine has two suitors and they are both worthy of her affection; she makes the ultimate choice. That’s not a bad thing for young women to think about.

  25. 25.

    Walker

    March 18, 2012 at 5:47 pm

    @Arm the Homeless

    I really can’t remember reading ‘YA’ lit. I remember going from Bunnicula into Orwell and Wheel of Time between 8th and 9th grade.

    Except that sometimes that stuff gets reclasified. I am from the fantasy generation just before that. Back then, Brooks and Eddings were not classified as YA. But they are Now ( and looking back at those books, rightly so).

  26. 26.

    farmette

    March 18, 2012 at 5:48 pm

    Everything about Parable of The Sower by Octavia Butler rang unfortunately, then hopefully, true. I never understood why this great story and Nebula Award winner for best science fiction novel did not receive more attention. The main character is a woman who suffers from hyperempathy which causes her to share pain or perceived pain with any living creature she sees. And her philosophy, Earthseed, is just right for the times.

    Earthseed:

    All that you touch
    You Change.

    All that you Change
    Changes you.

    The only lasting truth
    Is Change.

    God
    Is Change.

  27. 27.

    celticdragonchick

    March 18, 2012 at 5:53 pm

    @dogwood:

    In this series the heroine has two suitors and they are both worthy of her affection; she makes the ultimate choice. That’s not a bad thing for young women to think about.

    (spoilers!)

    Does she? One suitor is involved in weapons design for District 13 by the middle of the third book. He probably designed(or at least inspired the design of)the booby trapped fire bomb packages that end up killing Primrose (and dozens of other children). I think it was clear that he removed himself from the equation by the end of Mockingjay due to his own guilt. He did not mean for the weapons to be used deliberately against “friendlies”, but something he helped build killed the sister of the young woman he loved. After the brief meeting where Katniss asks him if the bombs were his, he never tries to talk to her again, nor does he return to District 12.

  28. 28.

    FridayNext

    March 18, 2012 at 6:01 pm

    I liked The Hunger Games a Lot, but this idea that these post-apocalypse stories are new in YA is ahistorical. My generation, at least those boys I knew, lived for the Trilogy Series by John Christopher that started with the White Mountains which appeared in 1968 if I recall. Christopher (real name Sam Youd) also wrote a bunch of other post-apocolypse novels and series from The Death of Grass to the Sword of the Spirits Trilogy. There is also the classic The Giver. Also dozens and dozens of lesser lights from Z is for Zachariah to House of Stairs.

    The only thing new about The Hunger Games is that instead of a plucky young boy protagonist, there is a plucky young girl. They even all have strange ceremonies whether it is The Capping, The Reaping, or the Ceremony of 12.

    They are a lot of fun, but they aren’t that original. The question is not why are post-apocolypse novels popular it is why are they popular AGAIN or STILL and I think the truth, as in all things, can be found on the Simpsons when Bart said, “Making music to depress teenagers is like shooting fish in a barrel.”

  29. 29.

    FridayNext

    March 18, 2012 at 6:04 pm

    @Walker:

    It is weird that way. Ender’s Game became a YA novel at some point as did the Wizard of Earthsea novels. Not sure when that happened.

    The Wrinkle in Time novels, though, are YA novels you can read with your head held high and not apologize.

    I also saw a YA edition of The Life of Pi once. Not sure that should be, but no one asked me.

  30. 30.

    dogwood

    March 18, 2012 at 6:13 pm

    @celticdragonchick:

    To be honest I don’t recall all of the details you are referencing. I was speaking more generally. The two young men were attracted to the heroine for the right reasons, and her feelings for each of them seemed rooted in her understanding of their fundamental character, something you don’t always see in YA lit.

  31. 31.

    celticdragonchick

    March 18, 2012 at 6:17 pm

    @dogwood:

    The two young men were attracted to the heroine for the right reasons, and her feelings for each of them seemed rooted in her understanding of their fundamental character, something you don’t always see in YA lit.

    I would agree with that.

  32. 32.

    Peter

    March 18, 2012 at 6:25 pm

    @Brachiator: You don’t research the post-apocalypse, you research things like ‘what foods do you eat and what do you sell when you’re living in starvation conditions’, ‘are you really starving if you have a constantly producing milk goat among other things’ and ‘how do repressive governments ACTUALLY successfully keep their subjugated populations divided against one another’. Or ‘which side do mountains usually benefit in a battle with insurgents’.

  33. 33.

    Comrade Mary

    March 18, 2012 at 6:26 pm

    According to this archery coach, the actress playing Katniss in the movie has received proper training and shoots with excellent form. (The guy playing Hawkeye in The Avengers? Err, not so much.)

  34. 34.

    celticdragonchick

    March 18, 2012 at 6:33 pm

    @Peter:

    ‘what foods do you eat and what do you sell when you’re living in starvation conditions’,

    It was clear that District 12 was reliant on government imports of food for most caloric requirements, and that animal protein was especially rare.

    ‘are you really starving if you have a constantly producing milk goat among other things’

    Ask somebody who has scurvy. Also, it is mentioned that the family was in pretty dire straights until they got the goat and could generate income from it.

    ‘how do repressive governments ACTUALLY successfully keep their subjugated populations divided against one another’.

    Utterly irrelevant here, since she was drawing a very deliberate and specific parallel with how the Minoans dealt with a subjugated population in mythology.

    ‘which side do mountains usually benefit in a battle with insurgents’.

    Mountains usually favor a defender. Thusly, when the insurgents attack a mountain fortress in District 2, they run into problems.

  35. 35.

    Peter

    March 18, 2012 at 6:43 pm

    Imitating Greek myth is a poor excuse for shoddy Worldbuilding. And it doesn’t even make sense that the Districts would have to attack the Capital, the whole point of the books is that all the resources are out THERE and the Repressive Government is squeezing them dry.

  36. 36.

    SiubhanDuinne

    March 18, 2012 at 7:34 pm

    @Yutsano:

    And do NOT get me started on the colour pink.

    So basically you’ve had no problem with the Susan G. Komen boycott, right?

  37. 37.

    Ron Beasley

    March 18, 2012 at 7:42 pm

    I started high school in 1964. By the time I was a senior all we were thinking about was how to stay out of the rice paddies and jungles of Vietnam. Now that was apocalypse.

  38. 38.

    PurpleGirl

    March 18, 2012 at 7:48 pm

    @Raven: Alas, Babylon was one of the first SF novels I read. It remains a favorite, although I haven’t reread it in a quite a few years.

  39. 39.

    Brachiator

    March 18, 2012 at 8:02 pm

    @Peter:

    You don’t research the post-apocalypse, you research things like ‘what foods do you eat and what do you sell when you’re living in starvation conditions

    I was teasing you, but you still make my point. Novels ain’t documentaries. The only thing that matters is that you write a compelling story.

    The most realistic apocalyptic story might be that things are so fucked up that everybody dies; but this would be too downer of a book, even for goths.

    By the time I was a senior all we were thinking about was how to stay out of the rice paddies and jungles of Vietnam. Now that was apocalypse.

    Well, Apocalypse, Now.

  40. 40.

    Narcissus

    March 18, 2012 at 8:21 pm

    On the Beach was my introduction to the apocalypse. It’s grim as hell.

  41. 41.

    DW

    March 18, 2012 at 8:41 pm

    @Brachiator: For good science fiction, the background and world details are supposed to make sense and it sounds like “The Hunger Games” has howlers that would offend hard core sf fans that could also easily be fixed. The mountains are a lousy place for a capitol – it’s too impractical to ship in food and water. You’d need to be near a port or failing that by a railroad station. Likewise, there’s no need to assault the capitol – just cut it off and let it starve. This allows for added angst when the heroes walk into the conquered capitol and realize all the misery and suffering they caused by their siege. It also wouldn’t mess with the basic plot. Part of the pleasure of SF is creating a plausible world – the wiz-bang stuff is much less appealing if the world’s not believable.

  42. 42.

    Cat Lady

    March 18, 2012 at 8:50 pm

    I read A Canticle for Liebowitz at a very young age and assumed we would all die in a nuclear event, but now I think it’s the microorganisms that will get most of us, before and as a result of climate change.

    Have a nice day!

  43. 43.

    kuvasz

    March 18, 2012 at 9:32 pm

    Well, I started school in ’59’ and your emo-shit has nothing on being a four year old and being told to “duck-and-cover” under your desk to keep from being incinerated by atomic bombs.

  44. 44.

    sharl

    March 18, 2012 at 9:43 pm

    @Cat Lady:
    It would appear that Dr. Margaret Chan, head of the World Health Organization, agrees with you.

  45. 45.

    Barney

    March 18, 2012 at 9:53 pm

    I’m another ‘nuclear war will kill us all’ teenager – after watching Threads (“Threads makes The Day After look like A Day at the Races“) I wrote depressing pieces about dying in the cellar with my family while the world ended above, while Ronnie and Maggie stationed cruise missiles in my country.

    On a lighter note, yes, John Christopher’s Tripods trilogy was great. I graduated from that to John Wyndham end-of-the-world-in-that-particular-British-way books – Day of the Triffids, The Kraken Wakes, The Midwich Cuckoos, and The Chrysalids (OK, that last is set in Canada).

  46. 46.

    smintheus

    March 18, 2012 at 10:43 pm

    Think Progress is being way too optimistic in their assessment of how Hunger Games will resonate politically. I’ll be surprised if the Republicans don’t aggressively promote it as a tale of the tyranny of an overly centralized government in the hands of an arrogant, secretive, and effete manipulator of mass media…in other words, as a cautionary tale about Obama.

  47. 47.

    Mike S.

    March 19, 2012 at 3:32 am

    “around my bellybutton, where my head spent most of its time”
    lolwat?
    autofellatio

  48. 48.

    Aet

    March 19, 2012 at 12:44 pm

    Patton Oswalt recently wrote a book, titled “Zombie Spaceship Wasteland.” Great book, mostly about jokes and short stories. The title refers to a theory about young creative writers, and I’d consider it downright revelatory in terms of understanding popular fiction, especially the stuff where YA intersects with Sci-Fi/fantasy.

    The gist of the theory is that all young fiction writers can’t really explain the world around them: the world is a big place filled with rules, complexities, and biases we aren’t allowed to understand as kids, and they shock us into numbness and fear during adolesence. So the natural impulse of all young writers, and writers for young adults, is to reimagine the world, either by leaving it (Spaceships), removing the people from it (Zombies), or burning it to the ground (Wastelands).

    It sounds cliche, but once you start looking for it, you see it all over the place, its not limited just to young writers, and its also not uncommon to see all three archetypes combined. It’s common in characters: Darth Vader is a Zombie who lives on a Spaceship and comes from a Wasteland. It can compose entire themes: The Matrix is about zombies, who don’t know they are zombies living in a wasteland, until they are de-Zombified aboard a ‘hovercraft’. It also doesn’t age conceptually: BSG, both old and new, are about a group of humans in a Spaceship fleeing robots long thought dead who have turned their homes into a wasteland.

  49. 49.

    DFH no.6

    March 19, 2012 at 3:18 pm

    @Cat Lady:

    So we end up like Earth Abides instead of like A Canticle for Leibowitz?

    I’ll take that, considering how both books ended.

    Loved them both; read them back in the ’60s.

    Enjoyed a couple of the other “dystopian” books mentioned here, too: Alas, Babylon and Parable of the Sower (and its sequel, Parable of the Talents).

    I’ll catch Hunger Games at the movies.

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