The Dystopia of Starters

Two weeks ago in this space I wrote about Lissa Price's debut novel, Starters. It, like all great dystopian novels, is a mirror of today's society, rather than a window into a future world. If you haven't read it yet, well, you should--since you're reading this blog, you'll love Starters. It's about a dystopian society in which all but the young and very old have been killed by biological warfare. The old, Enders, control the government, media, and financial sectors. The young, Starters, are legally prohibited from working, and thus left to fight--literally--over the scraps the elderly don't wish to consume.

 

Starters presents an extreme view of the consolidation of power among the old and wealthy--or so I thought until I happened across this article last week. The article is titled The War Against Youth, which at first seemed like hyperbole aimed at selling magazines, but is really only barely an exaggeration. Here are the first three paragraphs:

Twenty-five years ago young Americans had a chance.

In 1984, American breadwinners who were sixty-five and over made ten times as much as those under thirty-five. The year Obama took office, older Americans made almost forty-seven times as much as the younger generation.

This bleeding up of the national wealth is no accounting glitch, no anomalous negative bounce from the recent unemployment and mortgage crises, but rather the predictable outcome of thirty years of economic and social policy that has been rigged to serve the comfort and largesse of the old at the expense of the young.

Stephen Marche goes on to catalog an extraordinary decline in the prospects of youth over the last 25 years.  Average net worth of those under 35 has fallen from $11,521 to $3,662.  The U.S. government now spends $2.40 on the elderly for every dollar spent on children. Older Americans have seen their wealth increase 42% while younger Americans have lost -68% of their net worth.

Is there any wonder why dystopian novels are so popular among teenagers? They depict the world we are bequeathing to our youth. All these novels are real. The gerontocracy of Starters, the brutal income inequality and reality TV distractions of The Hunger Games, the war on women of XVI and Truth, the environmental calamities of Shipbreaker--even the warped disaster response of my novel, ASHFALL: they all exist in our society today in some form.

We should celebrate the fact that so many adults are reading YA, Joel Stein notwithstanding. Perhaps they'll take something other than a few hours of enjoyment from our work. I suspect, however, that adults and politicians will fail to solve, or in some cases even to recognize, our society's problems. If the last 25 years are any guide, the best we can hope for is that they'll quit making it worse. If we must give our children a dystopia, perhaps the literature that accompanies it may inspire them to bequeath something better to our grandchildren.

Ten Things You Didn't Know About My Debut Novel, STARTERS, by Lissa Price

1. It sold right before May 2011 in six days and is being published by Random House Children’s Books, Delacorte, on March 13, 2012. That’s fast.
2. Because that was so fast, there isn’t as much perception about it as there might be – yet. We won’t have ARCs until later in January, so I’m grateful for any help spreading the word now. Thank you to the kind bloggers (Lenore was the first) who discovered Starters.
3. It’s sold to 20 countries so far and launches a new German YA imprint of the big publisher Piper Verlag called IVI. (The blue cover you see in my sig).
4. Starters was the only 2012 book that was featured at the 2011 SCIBA awards dinner where I dined with real, published authors including winner Andrew Smith (Marbury Lens), John Stephens (The Emerald Atlas) and Tahereh Mafi (Shatter Me).
5. A German TV journalist is coming with a crew to interview me next week. (yikes!)
6. The publisher just finished the amazing book trailer, complete with actors, sets, and special things I dare not reveal yet.
7. I’ll be on a six-city book tour the second half of March.
8. It is the first of a two-book series, a duology (no, I did not make that up), with the second one coming out December 2012. I’ve told my buds that until April I have no time to do anything more than eat, sleep, write, blog and sometimes tweet.
9. The concept was kept secret by my clever publisher all these months. With their permission, I revealed it on my bio here.
10. Starters has more sekreets, soon to be revealed.

Thank you, Beth, and this truly great group of authors for inviting me to be part of the League. I’ll try not to do anything to embarrass you all, like dance on tables or kiss poodles. At least, not on the mouth.