I sat down the other day to think about the future of writing, that is to say, the future we as writers see being published: Hunger Games, Wool, etc. Yes, I speak of the trend of the Post-Apocalyptic young adult. I won't pretend to know what started this trend in books specifically but readers seem to love bleak futures where young people have to fight against the power. It's very "Thunderdome" if I want to use an 80's reference that I hoped we could get beyond by this point. Lame jokes aside, I wanted to delve into my own thoughts on why readers are gobbling up the uncertain and certainly unappealing future.
Before I begin, I will admit I haven't read these books. I've been meaning to read Wool since it looked interesting but Hunger Games I avoided because honestly I don't like seeing children getting killed, especially over food. I certainly know the story, the trials and triumph, but it just didn't appeal to me. Still, its not far fetched to imagine these futures becoming a reality in our time. With threats such as ISL, the incursions of Russia, Iran's belligerence and the dysfunction of governments and the world at large, I think we as a public half expect to wake up one morning and find the apocalypse became reality.
We've seen it in movies, Mad Max and a few others, and its also a popular trend in games such as the Fallout series which pictures a post apocalyptic America circa after the cold war went red hot. Certainly we don't want such things to happen, but we like to read about them or experience them because of that hair's breadth proximity to our very real situations. Heck, I wrote a semi-post apocalyptic book when I was 12 and it was one of the first things I ever created as an honest novella.
Reading a post apocalyptic book, especially for a teenager, I think it's easy to put yourself in the shoes of someone like Katniss (the heroine of Hunger Games if you didn't know). Katniss wants to save her family, save herself, but in the process she stands up to an oppressive corrupt system run mostly by old people who say they know better. It's the classic teenage angst against "the man" against the odds of the situation. Teens and even adults can picture becoming a hero and leading a revolution that remakes society better and stronger than before.
In this sense, the hunger for apocalypse is really the desire for the aftermath. It is the desire for utopia to come, for the return of life, of beauty, of peace. We as readers long for the trials of our tiring lives to end, and for the proverbial savior (religious or fictional) to deliver us. In that sense then, it is not the apocalypse that sells, it is the eternity thereafter.
