Thought experiment: a YA dystopia ''in the past''!

I got to thinking. YA (young-adult) dystopian novels are so hot right now—The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Giver, etc., etc.—so:

I know it's kind of a paradox, since most sci-fi dystopias are either 20 Minutes into the Future or on some alternate world completely (so as to avoid possibly offending existing real-world governments), but what if there were a YA dystopia but set in the past?

Say, a YA-dystopian novel set in the Jim Crow South, or apartheid South Africa, or even Nazi Germany? I know those are sensitive topics, of course, but bear with me, since nearly everyone agrees that they ended up on the wrong side of history.

You'd have teenage girls (black, Jewish, other minority) surviving á la Katniss Everdeen, teaming up with other elements of La Résistance, fighting back against what are effectively totalitarian—and historical—Police States oppressing them. (Even the US was only a democracy for white men, and maybe a few white women, at the time—it was a brutal Police State towards everyone else.) It'd even be marketed as a YA novel.

Thoughts?

edited 11th Jan '16 2:56:31 AM by mirisu92

That's actually a pretty cool idea, but a lot of YA dystopia novels tend to have alternate history. For example, Hunger Games takes place after some kind of alternate Earth, and its hinted that it does take place after some very large tragedy, maybe to just North America, or the entire Earth(keep in mind however, I have not caught up with anything Word of God says, so I may be wrong about the HG information).

I'd say that if one were to write it, they should stray from using their own political views, or the political views that history imposes on the event the author chooses. Its a good idea, however, and could definitely be turned into a great YA novel. I'd choose something on the slightly modern side, but if one were to want to make something less than entirely modern, one could use tragedies or dictatorships from fairly modern times that had a lack of proper technology.

Also, I recommend playing with, but not going too into detail with human rights, considering human rights can end up very mature, disgusting, or wrong for certain book settings, but its entirely your choice, but keep in mind that most YA readers are mostly in the highschool/college range, and would most likely be turned off by delving too deep into the concept of human rights.

This was an excellent thought experiment, great idea.

Three Words: Nazi-occupied France

Ya got your cartoonishly and unambiguously evil dystopian police state, of which the ruling party is a sufficiently separate group from the oppressed civilians that readers don't have to think too hard about whether its right to kill them, on account of being an occupying foreign power and also Nazis. Ya got your badass sooper-secret resistance, which actually employed teenagers, if they volunteered (beggars can't be choosers, after all). Plus, it's France, which'll be good for that mandatory romantic subplot.

The only real problem is that unlike your typical YA dystopia, its neither La Résistance nor their young hero that eventually saves the day; it's the Allies, which from the context of the story would feel like a bit of a Deus ex Machina (not that theses sorts of stories have any qualms about Dei Ex Machinis, *cough* District 13 *cough*). Maybe have the young hero be the one to ask the Allies for help (you can't prove she wasn't). Or just pull an Inglorious Basterds and have her personally kill Hitler thereby "winning" La Résistance forever, history be damned.

edited 6th Feb '16 7:38:09 PM by BrokenEye

What's the difference between this and a straight Historical novel? How would you play something as an explicit "dystopia" rather than just Deliberate Values Dissonance - and why would you need to?

More importantly, Mirisu92, you misunderstand what the dystopia setting can, should, and ought to accomplish. I suspect you haven't actually read those books (the Giver was published in 1993 - it's already "in the past" and was even popular required reading in schools at the time), and only have the movies in mind.

Part of what a fictional setting does is avoid an obvious Foregone Conclusion. (Take Pans Labyrinth: if you know what happened during and after the movie's time frame, you know del Toro was Developing Doomed Characters. But most Americans don't, so there's no reveal to spoil.)

Etc, etc.

BrokenEye: Actually it did cross my mind at some point that Inglourious Basterds was a bit like a Hollywood-dystopia treatment of Vichy France, complete with a direct, happily-ever-after hit on Hitler himself á la President Snow (or Coin, more precisely). Only I don't think there were teenagers, except maybe for Shosanna, if a bit older. Plus of course that movie's alternate history now, obviously, and it really does speak to the American propensity for short, clean solutions (e.g. kill the leader, boom, The Empire crumbles).

DeusDenuo: I apologise. I've seen the whole THG series and the first Divergent movie. I guess I was thinking of the genre in general. I do suppose it's a problem if everyone knows how the story ends, kind of like why no one can ever make a straight adaptation of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde ever again—though I guess that's where the alternate-history part comes in as a good suggestion. That, or the story could focus on a very small subset of that dystopian society—it won't be as clean-cut as the YA dystopias we've all come to know and love, but you know, if one black teenager shoots a white landowner dead, or one Jewish girl does the same to a Nazi officer, the oppressed will be one step closer to getting their comeuppance. Baby steps, I guess.

P.S. And speaking of African Americans shooting white people dead, we could also bring up the subject of Django Unchained. It seems that if you want a YA dystopia in the past, all you need to do is put Quentin Tarantino's and Suzanne Collins' brains in a blender, and voila.

edited 12th Feb '16 6:48:17 AM by mirisu92

Well then, what we're talking about isn't a 'dystopia' sort of setting necessarily as an antagonistic one, where the setting itself is getting in the way of the protagonists' ability to accomplish things.

I'm also hesitant to call DjangoUnchained 'YA'. There has to be a limit on how apocalyptic the setting can be, before it is too much for consumers under a certain age, and there's ways to write for and towards that audience. Frankly, if you're dealing in YA stuff, that limits how antagonistic the setting can be. You have to assume a "Not In My Back-Yard" distance, and keep it firmly in the realm of fantasy so as to avoid dragging a YA down into the worst the current world has to offer. I suspect that's another reason why Hollywood isn't in a hurry to make films about minority kids getting the shit kicked out of them by a cold, two-faced world.

edited 17th Feb '16 4:49:05 PM by DeusDenuo

Well, that's true, Django Unchained is probably a couple of ratings levels above YA dystopias at least. But of course. It's a Tarantino movie, silly me.

Then again, there's another possible way to make this work, though it'd already be veering from the Hollywood YA dystopia standard, if there is one—make this hypothetical "period teen dystopia" some kind of Black Comedy, which might give the creators licence to poke fun at or exaggerate even the normally very serious issues of the time.

Which reminds me, there was in fact a YouTube series that did poke fun at teen dystopias. It's still set in the future, but otherwise it does fill the Black Comedy checkbox—check this out: Job Hunters.

First off, let me be the first to say that there's plenty of fascinating settings for a historical novel featuring people trying to survive in societies that would, by many modern standards, be considered pretty damn dystopian. If you want to write a story about a slave escaping the Confederacy and fleeing to the Union, an imprisoned intellectual attempting to break out of a Soviet gulag, or someone with liberal values attempting to stay alive during the Dirty War, go for it.

However, the problem you will run into is that your protagonists cannot topple or even notably change those societies without straying from history and into alternate history. In many cases, the best they can hope for is to stay alive, or possibly, to get out. No slave is going to bring down the CSA; that's what Grant and Sherman are for. No prisoner from the gulag is going to bring down Stalin, and sadly, no liberal intellectuals were able to shoot Videla and Massera.

That's not to say you can't tell a great story about surviving in or fleeing from one of those regimes. Shipbreaker and The Drowned Cities, two of my favourite works of YA dystopian fiction are all about people trying to get by in a post-apocalyptic American wasteland, with the protagonists of both books eventually opting for a response of Screw This, I'm Outta Here. A story that follows that sort of plotline in any of the settings that people in this thread have listed would be a perfectly fine read.

Alternately, if you do want your protagonists to bring down the society, write alternate history. Write the story of African-American resistance in an 1880s where the CSA won the Civil War and no outside help is coming. Write a story about some surviving Jews plotting to assassinate Hitler in a world where Europe stayed under his bootheels. I'd read it.

edited 6th Mar '16 9:22:37 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar

Granted, the idea that YA dystopias all have to end with the protagonist personally ending the society isn't a 100% flat rule. Hunger Games didn't end that way, Katniss was just used as a figurehead for the actual organized rebellion going on around her.

As for time periods, yeah war era Nazi occupied France is a goldmine for that. The allies coming in and liberating France doesn't even need to be seen as a Deus Ex, the protagonist could be working with a rebel group cooperating with allied forces, so when they allied forces do show up to save the day, it feels like both groups working together to reach a common goal.

One thing they could certainly do believably is be providing the Allies with information about where the best sites would be for the D-Day Landings.

Also, one could certainly tell a story about someone who becomes involved in the political effort to overthrow a dictatorship. The story of someone joining the "No" campaign that ousted Augusto Pinochet, in the face of political harassment and the always looming threat of being imprisoned, would certainly make for a good story and one in which the heroes could play a believable role in getting rid of a tyrannical government.