Following up on Cole’s latest post, here’s a link to the NYTimes‘ business-section report on “How Hunger Games Built Up Must-See Fever“:
…“This book is on junior high reading lists, but kids killing kids, even though it’s handled delicately in the film, is a potential perception problem in marketing,” he said.
__
One morning, he floated a radical idea: what about never showing the games at all in the campaign? Some team members were incredulous; after all, combat scenes make up more than half the movie. “There was a lot of, ‘You’ve got to be kidding. I don’t see how we can manage that,’ ” Mr. Palen recalled.
__
Eventually, he prevailed. “Everyone liked the implication that if you want to see the games you have to buy a ticket,” he said. Boundaries were also established involving how to position plot developments; in the movie, 24 children fight to the death until one wins, but “we made a rule that we would never say ‘23 kids get killed,’ ” Mr. Palen said. “We say ‘only one wins.’ ” The team also barred the phrase “Let the games begin.”
__
“This is not about glorifying competition; these kids are victims,” Mr. Palen said. A few months later, when a major entertainment magazine planned to use “Let the Games Begin” as the headline on a “Hunger Games” cover, Ms. Fontaine, traveling in London, frantically worked her cellphone until editors agreed to change it…
Apart from the standard gimmickry (social media, maaaaan!), seems like the goal is to position the teenage heroine’s adventures as halfway between Harry Potter (uniquely qualified hero undergoes arduous training for their quest to destroy the tribe-threatening monster) and Bella Swann of Twilight (blossoming teenager’s awakening sexuality introduces her to a world larger than both her dreams & her imagination). I haven’t read the books (yet), so I don’t know how true to the written word this megabudget adaptation is, but the story outlines have a ancient and more-or-less respectable lineage.
Reading all your comments made me wonder, though — do modern teenagers still read the foundational YA – Sci Fi/Fantasy stalwarts of the 1950s/60s, Andre Norton and Robert A. Heinlein’s pre-1960 novels?
How about the cold-war-inspired dystopias that gave me nightmares, such as Earth Abides, Alas Babylon!, and The Chrysalids (aka Re-birth)?
Frankensteinbeck
This is an open thread about YA literature… fine, fine. As gauche as plugging myself ever makes me feel, for the next 22 hours *MY* YA book Wild Children is available on Amazon for free here. I damn well think that children’s books do not have to be predictable genre fluff any more than adult books do.
(And seriously, plugging myself gives me the itchies. Laurie, feel free to erase this comment if you think it’s inappropriate.)
freelancer
I mentioned Earth Abides by George Stewart in the thread below as one of the best books I’ve ever read. It has a quiet literary quality that slowly builds and leaves an epic impact on the reader. It is magnificently crafted and still holds up today.
As far as the Hunger Games, I listened to the first quarter of the audiobook on my roadtrip across the Southwest last summer and was impressed. That it gets compared to Twilight is a crime. Collins’ narrative seems to be popular because it speaks to a feeling of strength, self-sacrifice, and courage innate in the reader’s mind.
Twilight’s Bella Swan is so vapid and obsessed with how hawt the two male suitors she has are that she has no ambition or self-serving thoughts or empowerment other than to submit to their collective wants. Bella is a vacant, cowardly, co-dependent held high on a pedestal whereas Katniss sees the world as how it really is, and voluntarily submits herself to the cruelty of her world in order to spare her sibling. I haven’t finished the first book, but that she survives the first book and lives through the 2nd and (I’m guessing) remains into the 3rd book of the series represents a narrative of a powerful female character with integrity and a willingness to make hard choices to better herself and those close to her. In this respect, any comparison between Collins’ series and Meyers’ pablum has to be considered a false dichotomy.
Frankensteinbeck
Now that my moment of Fluttershy is past, from what I can tell the old Sci Fi is so dated now, with the future already diverging, that it’s not being picked up. The YA market is having the same problems the whole book market has – it’s in a period of upheaval, and publishers are grabbing more and more desperately for ‘safe’ properties. This is about the same as periods where the movie industry does the same thing. With movies you get remakes, with books it’s ‘Publish non-threatening pulp that follows what we think is the trend until one of them gets lucky and becomes popular.’ That’s the story of Twilight’s success.
Spaghetti Lee
I’m a recent graduate of teenage-land. I personally liked Bradbury when I was in high school, and I know Asimov and Heinlein got mentioned sometimes. Aside from those sorts of titans, I’m not really sure. Among the mega-nerd crowd I’d say it was more anime than books of any sort (well, except Harry Potter.)
Regarding that we’re-not-saying-kill stuff, I honestly don’t know if the actual fanbase agrees with the ‘these kids are victims’ interpretation or are in fact in love with the murderous competition aspect. If it’s the latter, I don’t know who these suits think they’re fooling trying to clean it up.
Yutsano
@Frankensteinbeck:
I just squeed. I felt like sharing that.
Frankensteinbeck
@Yutsano:
I think we all have SOME area where oh no, we just couldn’t put ourselves forward, I mean, what if it’s some other pony’s turn? About the only thing I go Fluttershy on is salesmanship. Heaven knows I’ve got the self confidence of a charging bull elephant in every other aspect of life.
hells littlest angel
I would think Heinlein’s work today would seem not quite as dated as Tom Swift. A lot of his stuff is still in print, but I hope it’s being read by cranky, old right-wing chickenhawks.
I hear some guy named Philip Pullman is somewhat popular.
Joseph Nobles
@Frankensteinbeck: From what I’ve read, Twilight was originally one novel that was basically the story of the first book and the last combined. The editors saw franchise potential and helped Meyer discover a way to fit the middle two books in.
Frankensteinbeck
@Joseph Nobles:
Yep. Mercenary as Hell, the industry is right now. It’s very much having its own MBA moment. Hell, complete with outsourcing to agents.
Suffern ACE
I’m confused. This seems a lot like Battle Royale.
Yutsano
@Frankensteinbeck: For what it’s worth, she’s working on it.
Frankensteinbeck
@Yutsano:
That was SO ADORABLE. I had mixed feelings while watching it. The episode was so cute, but – and this is oddly almost on-topic – any episode that suggests it might fix the most obvious weakness of a character makes me massively nervous as a writer. You DO NOT remove the conflict from a character, because as much fun as it might be, they stop being interesting. I knew that the writers of MLP were too good for that to happen, and the last couple of episodes have proven that the only effect is that she’s now really *stubbornly* shy, but I felt like I was walking the edge of a cliff through the whole episode.
EDIT – Ooh, now that I can do so without feeling nervous, I should go back and rewatch that episode. I’ll get the full dose of Flutterjoy now!
piratedan
well Manga and graphic novels have made their inroads, I know that stuff like Bleach and One Piece are still popular when new editions hit the street, plus with most manga and anime being able to be seen online these days (and with the advent of Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim) they have a pretty big following. Plus, the series of adventure stories seem to do well, in addition to the above mentioned fare, Riordan’s Percy Jackson books are well received as well and Tolkien is still being passed down from parent to child.
Spaghetti Lee
Ponies. Argh. Damn you all.
Yutsano
@piratedan:
Tolkein was the only book my father ever required me to read. I think he pushed that because I had a college reading level by sixth grade. So he figured I could handle it.
@Spaghetti Lee: Love and tolerate you too dude. :)
Loneoak
I gotta say, Hunger Games is among the best novels I’ve ever read. I’ve always had a soft spot for YA science fiction, but this is truly a brilliant trilogy that has a gripping pace and a very sharp political edge.
Anya
@Suffern ACE: That’s because it is very similar. Picture Battle Royale and The Running Man, but with a post-apocalyptic American-type country divided into 12 districts. Two kids from each district get chosen every year for the Hunger Games, but only one survives.
The comparisons to Twilight are absurd. Katniss is nothing like Bella except in being a teenage girl. The Hunger Games are actually a very interesting trilogy for YA books. Twilight are just a bunch of self-insert Mary Sue fantasies for the author to live out her dream of two guys fighting for her affection.
The prophet Nostradumbass
We have a thread on YA books and nobody has mentioned Judy Blume?
Xenos
I picked up the Foundation Trilogy a few weeks ago because I thought of pushing it on my 12 year old son. I enjoyed them as a young teen, and again in my 20s, but the gender roles and the politics are so, so, so dated now. Defoe is fresher.
Heinlein, Niven, Pournelle… just so culturally reactionary, and so unnecessarily, too. What did all the sexism and obsession with lords and ladies do for ‘A Mote in God’s Eye’, anyway? Even the quasi-fascist pulp fiction out of Baen is more enlightened than that, most of the time. After Octavia Butler and Doris Lessing there is just no going back.
Narcissus
I mentioned in one of the threads earlier that I got my start in apocalyptic fiction through On the Beach. I think it’s the only dystopian/apocalyptic fiction I’ve read where absolutely everyone dies.
I tried reading Starship Troopers recently, and fully the first half of the book is about how great boot-camp is. I’m not sure if I’ll read the rest.
MikeJ
You want real science fiction? Check out Edroso’s Voice column. Rightbloggers claim the reason Santorum hates porn is because he’s a liberal.
Insomniac
@Frankensteinbeck: I’m enthralled! Read the first bit from the “Look Inside” option and have now downloaded and am reading the rest. Fascinating so far. I like it.
piratedan
@Anya: sounds like it even has similarities to one of my favorite Steven King novellas “The Long Walk”. If you haven’t read it, do so, think it’s under his Bachman Books collection.
SiubhanDuinne
@Frankensteinbeck:
Just downloaded to my Kindle. Thanks! I’m looking forward to reading it.
Anya
@piratedan: I haven’t read The Long Walk yet, but I skimmed the Wikipedia entry about it. Yeah, there are some similarities.
Basically, in The Hunger Games, North America’s been destroyed in some massive apocalyptic event and is now called Panem. Panem gets divided into 12 districts with a central government in the Capitol. The Capitol has all the wealth and power, the other 12 districts are poorer.
As it turns out, there were actually 13 districts, but District 13 rebelled and got destroyed. As punishment for that rebellion, the Capitol forces the 12 remaining districts to choose one boy and one girl between ages 12-18 as tribute every year to fight to the death in an arena that the Capitol controls.
The books actually have a fair bit of violence and intrigue, as well as political and social commentary, already placing them miles above Twilight and its vapid fluff about two boys fighting over a girl. For YA books, they’re smart and interesting. I’m in my 30’s and I read them because my grad school classmates were passing them around like they were the greatest thing ever. They’re worth a look, IMO.
Awesome
A movie about kids killing kids. What could be more wholesome? Are they going to premiere it in Columbine?
Schlemizel
I read both Norton and Heinlein as a kid. Norton made me think being an outsider was not only OK but actually preferable, a thought I still hold today. RAH wrote very much in the vein of Horatio Alger, young guy with brains & integrity overcoming the doubts and long odds. Both have their place in the mythology of America.
Since my own kids are well past YA I have no idea – death matches!? WOW? How do they make that work for kids? I guess the world really has changed
MBL
Yes, Awesome, they are, and they’re going to hand out knives and bomb-making manuals to the first thirty moviegoers under twelve for each showing. Anyone over twelve also gets a copy of the Kama Sutra and a condom with a hole in it.
geg6
Hell, Anne Laurie, what you call foundational books for YA, I call I’ve never read or, for most of those titles, even heard of. And I was a voracious reader from age 5. But my tastes ran more toward Dickens and Defoe.
That said, I really loved Hunger Games and so does my ten-year-old niece. Katniss Everdeen, the heroine, is an awesome feminist role model and the social commentary (violence as entertainment, 99% v 1%, the effects of war, etc.) is very well done. It’s definitely dystopian, but hopeful. And not too science fictiony for those of us who aren’t fans of that genre, of which I am definitely one. Not a fan, that is.
the fugitive uterus
real life trumps fiction/fantasy everytime. don’t believe me? then you haven’t been paying attention the last 12 years.
Comrade Scrutinizer
Two really good post-nuclear apocalypse books, both written by Phillip Wylie (When Worlds Collide): Tomorrow! and Triumph.
Tomorrow! was written early in the Cold War (1954), five years before Alas, Babylon!, while Triumph was written after the Cuban Missile Crisis (1963). Wylie was involved in the Civil Defense program, and Tomorrow! (like Alas, Babylon later on) reflects the essential optimism that if we plan for war and take suitable action, survival and victory are possible after an exchange of atomic weapons.
By 1963 and the development and deployment of fusion weapons of much higher yield, Wylie was much less sanguine. Triumph, an ironic title if ever there was one, shows the outcome of a general nuclear exchange.
I was also a fan of Trinity’s Child, Red Alert, and Fail-Safe.
As far as The Hunger Games goes, I’m not sure how good the movie will be. I thought the books were a decent read, but I wouldn’t put them in the classic category. Those books are mostly inside Everdeen’s head and are surprisingly short of action. Everdeen spends most of the time controlled by outside influences, and used by various groups. As far as I could tell, she only really has three or four overt acts of defiance over the course of the three books. She ultimately fails in the thing that motivates her to get involved in the Games. She’s not really a hero for most of the series—mostly she’s a survivor.
John Marsden’s Tomorrow, When the War Began series was much better at showing the development of a character thrust into a violent environment—I found Ellie Linton to be a much more interesting character than Katniss Everdeen.
matt
sounds like battle royale.
Swellsman
Madeline L’Engle. ‘Nuff said.
squirrelhugger
I was shocked when I discovered the Tiffany series of Terry Pratchett books in the YA section, then I had to laugh at myself for not seeing it. Still haven’t figured out if he intended that, or if his creativity just bubbles wherever.
WereBear (itouch)
Thanks, Frankensteinbeck! Looking forward to it.
What is the big deal of kids killing each other off? This is fantasy/science fiction. Have you seen the video games released now?
Besides which, parents will just now discover what it is about :)
WereBear (itouch)
Now if it were a touching drama of two troubled teens finding solace in each other’s arms and having SEX the Right Wing screaming would never stop.
Southern Beale
Well, as I said downthread, I loved the Hunger Games and I also loved The Passage, another YA novel. I never read Harry Potter and wasn’t that interested, got dragged to the movies, thought they were imaginative but that was about it.
I’d been working on a novel on and off for 10 years or so but my protag was a 12-year-old girl, and an agent where I workshopped it told me, “Oh! So you’re writing YA fiction then … ” and she was just very very insistent that if my protag is 12 years old, I MUST write YA. I’m like … no. This is not YA. And she said YES IT IS.
So I wasted a bunch of time rewriting my story from different perspectives and it just never gelled. And I kinda had to put it aside after a while. And last week I went to a bookstore and saw my book written by someone named Lauren Groff. Her protag is a young boy but both of our books are very similar.
So lesson learned.
I bought Groff’s book on Friday, haven’t read it yet.
aimai
I’m so old I read everything: Heinlein, E.E. Doc Smith, Poul Andersson, blah blah blah. Also the kids stuff. Also Dune. My YA loves Hunger Games and she loved Harry Potter but hated Twilight. Both my children are a lot less adult book oriented than I was at that age–maybe because there is so much more to read for the YA reader than 40 years ago. Both went through a Tamora Pierce period and read everything she ever wrote. Both prefer, and can get, books with Heroines instead of Heroes and series instead of one off, walk on parts for girls.
My children, unlike myself, have also had to wrestle with the most misbegotten “Facing History and Ourselves” curriculum which pushed the horrors of WWII and Segregation right down their throats. In fact, the entire curriculum at their school began in 7th grade with Utopias and Dystopias, Harrisson Bergeron and then straight to the Nazis and Eugenics. Hunger Games merely gave shape to the feelings of extreme horror, angst, and rage that these kids are feeling.
aimai
Cheryl from Maryland
I was devoted to Andre Norton as a child and am trying to get those of the Harry Potter generation to read her works. However, I found the Hunger Games even more enthralling than Ms. Norton’s work because of the depiction of the adults. YA memes have adults abandoning their role as protectors. Adults in most YA books are only teachers who stand aside (and/or die), clueless or evil so the hero/heroine can emerge. Many of the adults in the Hunger Games are aware of the wrongness of their society, are crippled by it, and change. They have growing up to do as well. The caliber of actors playing the adults suggests the film reflects this. I’m looking forward to it.
aimai
BTW Suzanne Collins also wrote a marvellous series called Gregor the Overlander. Just delightful. It was based on the premise that magical and mysterious things can happen, even in modern New York, and it begins with the hero (a boy but a very unique one, in my opinion) pursuing his baby sister after she is pulled into an underground world by giant cockroaches. Its not only wonderful to read aloud but to listen to the taped version is fantastic. I highly recommend it for kids and parents between the ages of 10-12, maybe 8.
aimai
greennotGreen
I’ve read Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit, Will Travel eleven times; I think I can still quote a few things from it. It would make a great movie, now that Mother Thing can be rendered in CGI. The creepy incest themes and sexism (women are strong but have mysterious powers) in his adult works bugged me, but the YA stuff was great.
And,@Southern Beale: don’t judge Harry Potter by the corporate-spawn movies. The books are great!
greennotGreen
Hey, I’m in moderation on a YA lit thread! And I can’t edit out a repeated word! I haz a sad.
beatty
@Frankensteinbeck – I’ve downloaded your book as well. Looking forward to reading it this week. Thanks!
celticdragonchick
As fairly obvious from the previous threads, I read and loved all three in the Hunger Games trilogy, although I would say that Mockingjay should be considered military science fiction instead of YA fiction.
polyorchnid octopunch
I’ve read a whole bunch of that kind of stuff and one of the ones I thought was great was the Tripods series by John Christopher. Totally worth checking out.
Kirbster
YA must be a hot trend. Even legal thriller writer John Grisham has jumped on the bandwagon with a series called Theodore Boone, Kid Lawyer. The 12-year old slueth is almost a throwback to the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew, with a little Perry Mason on the side.
Benno
To answer your foundational question, my 14 y.o. won’t touch the likes of Norton or Heinlein, as much as I’ve tried. To her credit she murder-hated Twilight and loved Tolkein (and Pratchett, though he’s a bit out of the era), but I just can’t get her interested in the classics that I loved as a young lad.
That said, I’ve been re-reading Foundation recently and am sadly unimpressed. Clifford Simak, however, is a blast.
RSA
@polyorchnid octopunch:
Ditto. I re-read them recently (The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead, and the Pool of Fire), and they stand up well. These novels, as far as I can remember, were my introduction to science fiction.
FridayNext
No, as far as I can tell, kids don’t read much Heinlein, Norton (early Norton), or other foundational YA SciFi. But why pick on them? Most adults don’t read the Lensman series either. Or Welles, or Poe, or Burroughs, or other foundational Adult SciFi.
And how many adults who read serialized Star Wars/Trek/Gate books read Heinlein or Bradbury?
Again, why pick on the kids?
On the other hand, talking to my students it sounds like A Wrinkle in Time and The Giver are still relatively popular.
Love the Tripod Series. BTW: Sam Youd, aka John Christopher, died last month.
FridayNext
@RSA:
The White Mountains was my first novel. I dreaded turning 13 and being capped. I had nightmares.
Anyone see the British TV series? I haven’t and am curious.
Sounds like they use the old Doctor Who theme, at least for the trailer.
FridayNext
And if you want a really good YA read, though not SciFi, might I suggest the Astonishing Life of Octavia Nothing: A Traitor to His People. It is a two volume work on the life of a slave boy during the American Revolution. It is a tough read, no doubt, for both the content and the prose, but it is one of the best historical novels I have ever read YA, Adult, or otherwise.
It doesn’t hurt that I read it on Audiobook and the reader was one of my favorite judges from the original Law and Order.
RSA
@FridayNext: Hey, cool, I didn’t know there was a TV series.
And the Doctor Who music is strange in this context…
muddy
I really liked Heinlein when I was young. In more recent years I have been trying to cull the hordes of books in here, and I will re-read most of them before they go, one last chance to earn a place to stay.
I was horrified at the incest and gender issues. College age girls confiding to their old daddies that they wished he’d be the one to introduce them to sex etc. icky
geg6
@FridayNext:
I read that, too. Excellent book. Just excellent.
Scott P.
I still consider the Foundation Trilogy the best sci-fi series ever written. Just outstanding.
Note that “A Mote in God’s Eye” takes place in Pournelle’s universe, not Niven’s. Pournelle has been reactionary for a long time (in one of his early works the ‘hero’ deals with protesters by luring them into a sports arena then machine-gunning them down). Niven I hear has turned tea party in his twilight years (which saddens me as he is my favorite sci-fi author), but his early work doesn’t have the same political slant.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
Some excellent YA reads, while not SciFi, are from Carl Hiaassen. I read Hoot, but have not read the other two.
CaseyL
“The Disappearance,” Philip Wylie; 1951.
Each sex vanishes from the other’s universe. It was considered so revolutionary at the time, in how a men-only and women-only world (only humans are affected) was portrayed, that reviewers almost uniformly vilified the writer and the work.
I reread it a few years ago and, not surprisingly, found most of it dated. But it’s still a great read. It can be read not only as a fascinating study of how men and women would cope with a world in which the other gender has vanished, but also as a keen and unsentimental look at mid-20th Century American society.
Original Lee
My two YAs loved Gregor the Overlander, Tolkien, Harry Potter (not so much Twilight), Pratchett, and Diane Duane’s wizard series. They are very much into anime right now. L’Engle was considered OK. My son liked the Hunger Games.
They both are assigned dystopian fiction for school, including Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Shadow Children series and Orson Scott Card’s Ender series. And even though Red Canoe and Lord of the Flies are not SciFi, they contain sequences about children killing children, so I guess that theme is just popular right now among literature educators.
samara morgan
oh jaysus h keeyrist inna handcart, old JAFI.
youth sacrifice is as old as recorded history.
like virgins for dragons and the Athenian tribute to Crete?
get a damn clue.
Ohio Mom
@Original Lee: My kid also had to read Haddix in school — for him, it was Found. I thought she was a perfectly awful writer. Wooden language and cardboard characters. Could not figure out what the teachers saw in it.
Next year they’ll be assigning Hunger Games, so yes, I agree dystopia seems to be in with LArts teachers these days. Wonder why.
Frankensteinbeck
@muddy:
Senility. Heinlein’s 12 year old’s grasp of morality troubled me enough, but Stranger In A Strange Land marks the beginning of an obvious, slow descent into Alzheimer’s. He can’t keep straight which book he’s writing anymore. The plots become garbled, and he ends up writing bad fanfic of his earlier books. It’s really, really sad.
@WereBear (itouch):
You mean The Golden Compass? A trilogy where two twelve year olds kill God, then save the multiverse by having sex? I’m not one for dumbing down children’s lit of any kind, but that was an odd ending.
Origuy
@Scott P.:
No argument about Pournelle’s politics, but the Falkenberg story is straight from Byzantine history: Justinian’s solution to the Nika riots. There are a lot of historical references in his works. Just because he writes about it doesn’t mean he endorses it.
PaulB
Haven’t read “The Hunger Games” yet but did pick the first one up as my latest pick in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. Also wanted to bring up the Chronicles of Prydain series by Lloyd Alexander that I remember fondly.
Djur
@CaseyL: If we’re going to talk authors with weird sexual politics, Wylie would be at the top of the list. Momism and all.
@squirrelhugger: The Tiffany Aching books were written and categorized as YA fiction. They’re not a whole lot different in tone from Pratchett’s other work, though.
Foundation’s gender politics might be dated (although I thought Bayta was pretty good as far as ’50s-era SF heroines go), but I would hate to think that kids these days don’t at least read the first stories about Salvor Hardin.
And reading Ursula K. Le Guin should be mandatory for every human being.
Ken J.
From a movie fan’s perpective: Jennifer Lawrence was jaw-dropping incredible in the movie “Winter’s Bone”, playing the backwoods teenager with a core of steel as she tries to unravel what happened to her missing, meth-cooking dad. I’m pretty sure that’s how Ms. Lawrence got the part in “Hunger Games.” But, much as I would like to see her in another movie, I don’t think I can go see a movie about killing kids for a game.
Mnemosyne (iTouch)
Even in my biggest sci-fi reading frenzy, I never read Heinlein. I don’t know if it’s because I skipped right to adult books or because I preferred more fantasy, but I just never got around to him. Weirdly, I ended up readin writers like L. Sprague de Camp, who I never hear anyone talk about.
One book I remember loving is Marvin Kaye’s “The Incredible Umbrella,” where a guy finds a magical umbrella that takes him into classic works of literature, including an early draft of Sherlock Holmes where Holmes has a different name. Very fun for a precociously bookish child.
Nicole
Alas, Babylon– wow, I haven’t thought about that book in years. I remember my best friend and I read it on our own and then it was later assigned in school. I can still remember our teacher explaining the finding salt (or rather, the convenient remembering just in time of a convenient location of salt) as being an example of a deus ex machina.
Looking forward to the movie of The Hunger Games– I really enjoyed the book.
Scott P.
I’m aware of the historical parallels. It’s pretty clear Pournelle endorses it, at least in a vicarious sense. His protagonist performs the action, and there is no negative commentary in the narrative. Moreover, all of his protagonists are right-wing militaristic authoritarians. Human society in his main universe is based on ancient Sparta! (And not in a ‘let’s overthrow this oppressive government’ sense but in a ‘finally we got rid of those stinking hippies’ sense).
Origuy
@Mnemosyne (iTouch): De Camp and Fletcher Pratt’s Harold Shea stories are classics of the SF humor genre. The Viagens stories are great, too, but I don’t know if those are still in print. Poul Anderson had some great stories along the same lines that were accessible to a young reader (me.)
I loved the Narnia books. The Christian allegory is a bit heavy-handed to an adult, but as a kid I didn’t mind it.
Daaling
Baaaaaaa, you are all sheep. Cole is still asking about it so that makes him a wannabe sheep. Completely unaware he could ask his cat or, you know, google it!
Hob
@Suffern ACE, @matt: Despite what Anya said above, I’ve gotta say it’s really not like Battle Royale at all. I mean, yes there are teenagers who are in a fight to the death, but you might as well say that every Western where guys in hats fire guns is the same.
The Hunger Games is mostly about the world outside of the game, and the focus is on economic need and trying to protect your family. I don’t think the political premise is super well constructed (as in, I have trouble believing that the stated reason for the games would hold up for 75 years but otherwise it’s a well described world, with a focus on class conflict and privilege that’s unusual for a YA adventure.
Battle Royale (at least the movie – I don’t know the novel) is more of a straight-up exploitation thriller where all you really need to know is “teens are out of control” and “this one teacher is reeeeeally bitter” and “wouldn’t it be cool to see a mean cheerleader stabbing people.” That’s not necessarily a bad thing – I do dig the movie.
Persia
@Hob: Hob, I think Battle Royale, while still pretty straight-up exploitation, doesn’t really think that kids are out of control, rather than the authoritarian government wants everyone to think so to keep them scared. (The book states it pretty clearly.)
ReflectedSky
@Joseph Nobles:
“convinced her to trash her central concept by adding a love triangle to soak up the cash.”
Fixed it for you.
Katniss is really NOTHING like Bella Swan. I always come into these threads late, so I’m going to finish reading before I say more.
ReflectedSky
@FridayNext: I LOVED The White Mountains. The kid, a voracious reader from age two, couldn’t get into it whenever it was that she tried. She was very into The Hunger Games until Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock came along. She’s still going to the midnight show; I get to tag along. From the early reviews, it sounds as mediocre as I feared (wrong director/writer, wrong Peeta, but amazing Katniss).
The Golden Compass trilogy was one of her favorites when she was younger. That’s really an amazing piece of work. I would argue it’s less “anti-religion” than it is “anti-Catholic,” or even “anti-Catholic authoritarianism” and boy does it look prescient right about now.
She’s at a big dance audition. I know I’m an outsider here, but it was still really soothing to come here. For what it’s worth, I think Mockingjay has a lot of structural problems, and I suspect much of that is due to the editors and the movie producers pressuring her to hype the triangle and deliver a big third act action sequence. (All fantasy films must now have the equivalent of the Battle of Helms Deep, it seems.) I think they’re getting a different writer and director for the second book/film, which would be a good thing. Catching Fire could be an amazing movie; it’s tighter than Hunger Games. (I know Ross has quit at least one of those roles; he should quit both. He’s VERY poorly suited to this material.)
brantl
@hells littlest angel: Heinlein is a libertarian, The wingnuts read him all time.
Brachiator
Nope.
At least, this is true of the circles of younguns I know.
The Cold War is ancient history, without the resonance.
@freelancer:
I don’t know that I totally agree about this, but in any event, tons of teen girls, and older women, can empathize with Bella’s obsessions. Kinda why the novels are popular.
And it should be obvious that young girls and women can read and fantasize about obsessively slobbering over hawt guys while leading a more decisive real life.
@Frankensteinbeck:
Much of the stuff that preceded Twilight is just as junky. I loved a lot of SF as a teen, but would never try to defend much of it as being particularly good (with lots of exceptions).
On the other hand, I was never much interested in any fiction that was specifically targetted to kids, teen, or young adults.
ReflectedSky
@freelancer: Comparing Twilight and HG is definitely based on superficial things — they’re YA, they’re popular, they have a female lead. Stephanie Meyer is a poor writer, but a good storyteller. Twilight is basically soft erotica — I still can’t believe people were letting their seven year olds read it. Does no one pre-read?
For what it’s worth, read across all four books, Twilight becomes a feminist parable. Bella gets everything she wants, bosses all the powerful men/creatures around, owns her sexuality (that’s actually pretty rare and rather cool), and ends up a vampire superhero, who saves her man, her kid and her coven. The final scene is her letting him into her mind. She would have been happy to let him into her body in book 1. It’s really kind of moving that the culminating moment is, instead, him entering her thoughts. It’s a nice little metaphor about trust and what’s really important in relationships. It’s his ultimate craving — not to join with her physically (although it’s clear they both enjoy that a lot) but to commune with her mind, which had previously been closed to him. There’s a lot of creepy Mormon junk in those books, and a lot of female wish fulfillment that having had a baby, I totally get. (Give birth, and not only fully heal but become infinitely more beautiful as a result, while the baby ages up to self-sufficient toddler by the time you wake up? Count me in!) But the ending is genuinely interesting on a meta/metaphorical level.
Brachiator
@Scott P.:
There were hippies in ancient Sparta? Who knew.
@Cheryl from Maryland:
One of the things that I loved about the Harry Potter books is that the first young readers discovered them on their own. Neither librarians nor the legion of good hearted busybodies, or parents knew about or recommended these books (which might have put a taint on them).
I think that the best you can do is to encourage your kids to read and engage in literature, movies, etc. Then let them find the special stuff that will be most meaningful to them.
WereBear
@Frankensteinbeck: Mine was a hypothetical, but yes, Golden Compass was targeted by the Christian Right Wing. Haven’t read those personally, I have a coworker who loves them & read them with her kids.
The Grimm fairy tales I found in the library when I was 8, and those are the most frightening things I’ve ever read.
Emerald
@Ohio Mom: Wish I’d found this thread earlier! I review YA books for a major publishing magazine.
(I’ve reviewed all of the “Found” series so far. It’s written specifically for middle school, and I think it isn’t nearly as good as most of her stuff. Margaret Peterson Haddix is far better when she’s writing for an older audience, I think. She dumbs down the Found books terribly. Nice way of injecting history into the kids, however, so the books are quite useful for that purpose.)
Almost all the YA output these days is paranormal romance–Twilight is a perfect example. Most of it skirts the boundaries of “awful.” Just occasionally you get a decent writer, and occasionally you get somebody with some actual imagination (the Morganville Vampire books, for example, are entertaining–not the greatest writer, but good imagination and suspense). I think I’m going to throw the next mermaid book I get into the water hazard on the golf course below my hill, and the angel books tend to be even worse.
Plus, YA books used to have an unofficial limit of about 250 pages. Now some of the angel books, I kid you not, run over 600 pages.
On the bright side, the dystopia books tend to be better than the average. A series starting with the book “The Line” by Teri Hall was pretty good. “Dark Inside” by Jeyn Roberts comes across really well. I actually loved a ghost book called “Anna Dressed in Blood” by Kendare Blake–it has beautifully done ironic humor. Alas, though, the humor is so well done and so ironic that most readers will miss it completely.
There’s an excellent sci-fi book just out called “Planesrunner” by Ian McDonald (normally an adult sci-fi writer. This is his first YA book). It actually uses real science concepts to found the fiction (in this case parallel universes) and it’s the first in a planned series. The hero is a true geeky science nerd. He’s even good at math. Yay!
However, I don’t despair about the junky paranormal romances. A few years ago it was hard to find the YA section in Barnes & Noble. Now it takes up two sides of a long aisle. That’s because the kids are buying the books and are reading. They won’t stay with that genre forever, but now they have the experience of getting lost in a book they love, and they’re going to want to continue having that experience.
And that’s a win.
Linkmeister
@aimai: Have your daughters found Mike Shepherd’s “Kris Longknife” series yet? It’s military sci-fi with strong kick-butt female protagonist. They’re pretty good books.
Retief
I think you’re onto something with people not familiar with scifi going nuts for Hunger Games. This is hardly the first Deadly Games iteration. But if one hasn’t been inoculated with several previous doses of the idea it seems very cool.
I’m reminded of several of my friends back in college who got hold of Stephen King’s Eyes of the Dragon. They raved about it. It’s pretty unremarkable fantasy, but if you haven’t been exposed to swords and sorcery before, but picked it up because of Kings name, it seems more amazing than if one has read fantasy previously.
On the hunger games, I enjoyed the first one. The society she lives in though seems to me purely constructed enough to explain the existence of the titular games. I didn’t like the way they hit the reset button on her character for the second book.
Jeff Fecke
@muddy:
Heinlein took a sharp turn somewhere around Stranger in a Strange Land. By the time he got to Time Enough For Love, his work had severe elements of squick to it. That doesn’t mean his work is not worth reading; it is, save for To Sail Beyond the Sunset, Farnham’s Freehold, and Sixth Column. But it should be taken with a grain of salt; Heinlein’s worlds of Utopian anarchy are Utopian .
As for YA, I can tell you that my daughter is reading Hunger Games and enjoying it; I read the series first, and it’s tightly-written and happy to pull you up short any time you start enjoying the violence for violence’s sake. The Twilight comparison is incredibly unfair; Katniss is a realistically flawed protagonist, a survivor, and nothing like the Anti-Sue that Bella Swan is. More than a few of her victories are Pyrrhic. The series’ ending I will not spoil, but it’s both maddening and fascinating, and either horribly wrong or horribly right, which means that there was real thought put into it.
One other thing — I really am amazed at how much more emotionally complex popular YA stuff is as compared to, say, Vince Flynn or Dan Brown or Tom Clancy. Katniss Everdeen, Harry Potter, Meg Murray — all of them have a far deeper and more interesting inner life than Robert Langdon or Jack Ryan. I’m not sure why books aimed at kids seem to have more interesting characters than books aimed at adults, but they do. (One could make this reductive — “Collins, Rowling, and L’Engle are women! Flynn, Brown, and Clancy aren’t!” But Lyra Silvertongue also lives and breathes, and Phillip Pullman is male.)
Brachiator
@Retief:
I remember liking Eyes of the Dragon because it was disciplined, short, and relatively tightly constructed, and for me, better than King’s other fiction. I didn’t care for sword and sorcery for the most part, and was not much tempted by King’s novel.
Sometimes it’s just that a particular novel or series interests people, not an entire genre. I’ve known people who are nuts for Star Wars or Star Trek novels, who don’t care about any other SF.
On the other hand, a long time ago I liked the Keith Laumer SF novels that featured a protagonist named Retief.
mclaren
As depraved degenerate Shithole America sinks deeper into barbarism, the latest hit movie is…an orgy of kids murdering other kids!
Quelle surprise.
Americans adore suffering and hate joy. Americans love watching the helpless get brutalized. Nothing makes an Americano leap to his feet and recite the pledge of allegiance more than watching a child get murdered. There is no hope for this sick twisted country.
Sources for quotes: Wikiquote on the Phillipine-American War.
(But of course that’s all in the distant past… right? Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight… )
Cancer rate in Fallujah worse than Hiroshima.
John M. Burt
Well, if Frankensteinbeck is going to start off the thread with a self-plug, so will I.
My YA The Christmas Mutiny, available at my web site johnmburt dot com, depicts the young adults who were fighting the First World War putting a stop to all that nonsense.
I thought that was a good idea, and a good thing to write a book about.
Ali
It’s seems like Japanese Movie, Battle Royale.