After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia (41 page)

Jas and the others know by my face that the town will not join the Way. We gather
our things to leave. This time, it takes us longer to get to the next town. Jas is
so ill that he tells us we should cut our trip short and head back to Sandig. By the
time we reach home, three of our group have died. People are sick everywhere. They
eat, but most people are pale and thin. I am never sick. Neither are a few others.

When the time came for Ides, half of the Paters are dead. Jas is so weak that he does
not think he could even make the walk. Also, word has come that many towns on the
coast are having trouble. No one can figure out the sickness, or where it comes from.
We start to call it the Waste. We do not go to Count for Ides or for Fourth. Jas insists
that we follow the rule of quarantine.

But I am well. I am restless. After a few months, I begin to escape the town gates
at dawn and roam, as was my way. I notice that I am more healthy than I have ever
been, as though my body has more energy, more vitality. I notice more birds than the
year before. I notice things that fly from tree to tree. I notice that none of the
Romas are ill.

One of them seeks me out. He’s found a machine that still works. A rare find indeed.
It is one that I have been looking for, to replace the one that helps us to determine
illnesses. He wants to trade. But nothing that I had will do.

He shakes his head at everything I’ve brought.

“I have nothing left,” I say. “Everyone is ill. I’ve been quarantined for months.”

“No,” he says, poking at all the objects I’ve laid out before him. Then his eyes fall
on Minerve’s bag. He opens it, and out spills the hard yellow seeds into his hand.

“It’s worthless,” I say. “They are dry. I tried to eat one, it nearly broke my tooth.”

But the truth is that I want to keep the bag that Minerve gave to me with those yellow
pieces from the husks. They are from her, and I want to keep them close to me.

“This,” he says, and pushes the machine toward me. He takes the bag and walks away.

Jas is happy when I come back with the machine. I am not scolded for breaking quarantine.
But the machine does not reveal any sickness. If we are sick, it is from something
that we do not know. It is beyond the understanding of the machines.

Time goes on, and yet more people die. But not me. As they thin, I grow fatter and
stronger.

When News comes around, Jas had succumbed to the Waste, and although I am not yet
considered a man, I am now the head Counter. I wait till Ides to make my decision
to go on a walk without the other Paters. I will go Count. I will go see the towns.
But I will not put the other Paters in danger. I teach one of the young boys how to
use the machine in case I don’t come back. I put on my red robe and my yellow scarf
and begin the walk north.

So many villages are depleted of people. In some villages, everyone is gone. In one
village, there is a babe. Since we had not come for so long, it is almost a year old.
It is fat and round and healthy. When I prick its blood and put it on the machine,
the machine comes up two sequences green, two sequences red.

I prepare the poison, as I was taught. I take the mother’s hands and recite the script.
She bows her head and says thank you. I dip my finger in the poison and hold the babe
in my arms. I looked at the babe. Two sequences green, two sequences red.

Two sequences green, two sequences red.

I turn to the mother, my finger in the air. I deviate from the script.

“What is your code?”

She looks startled.

“Your code?” I ask. “Your sequence? Are you four? Or three?”

“I am three,” she says. “I’m sorry, I am only three.”

I look at her. She is healthy. She is round and well-fed and full of vitality. So
is the child.

Two sequences green, two sequences red.

Jas was four sequences. Everyone who has died was four sequences. I was three code
sequences green. One red.

I hand the mother back the babe. I wash my finger of the poison. She understands what
I am about to do. That I will not put the babe down. We do not speak of it. She is
afraid that if we do, I will change my mind. I have broken the only law of the Way
that has been understood to be unbreakable.

As I go from town to town, doing the count, I ask every healthy person what their
count is. They are all three for four. I make a decision to pass all babes no matter
if they are red or green. With no one to stop me, since I am alone on the road and
I am the Counter, none went down.

Something is wrong. The sequence is wrong. The code is wrong.

When I get back to Sandig, I am now the lead Counter. There are only four Paters left.

“What do we do?” they ask me. The ones that are left, Pat, Dug, Jig, and Mel are older
than me, but I am now the one to look up to.

“In the texts, there are sometimes answers.”

I went into the SciTexts. I go all the way back. To the beginning.

Some pages crumble at my touch. Some pages are like Jas said, incomprehensible. But
one day, some parts of different pages make sense together.

Due to mass transgenic cross-pollination and the insertion of genes into the genome
of food crops, unintended effects have begun to express themselves in the human host,
and the way that mutations affect the function of the crops own genes are unpredictable.…We
have reached a tipping point, and the development of unknown toxic components make
it impossible for humans to properly metabolize proteins in the following crops: corn,
soy, alfalfa, wheat.…Many other food stuffs may have been affected. The amount of
cross-pollination is at 98% in all crops.…As of this date, within twenty-five years,
we expect a mass population loss of five billion+ due to famine from the inability
of humans to digest and process these food crops.…Research indicates that genotyping
those with markers for the novel mutations TFDE109, TFDE110, TFDE111, and TFDE112
and crossbreeding the remaining human survivors with the aim of ensuring that those
born have a minimum of three, preferably four, mutations, should allow for human survival.…Short-term
solution includes breeding for the mutations.…Signs indicating the toxicity of crops
until correct mutations have been expressed is an option.…Literacy cannot be counted
on as a means of communication.…Note: There is, however, a high probability that,
in the future, there will be a shift back, and at that time the mutations TFDE109,
TFDE110, TFDE111, and TFDE112 will be detrimental to human metabolism.…The timescale
of this process cannot be estimated, since projections cannot be made due to the inability
to control crossbreeding of plant species in the wild.

I have my answer. I walk out of the room. I walk to the gates and I open them.

“What are you doing, Geo?” people ask.

“Close the gate, Geo,” people say.

“The Romas will come!” people say.

I go to each field on the outskirts of Sandig and I pick what was there. I ignore
the signs and take the things that grow that we have believed are poison. The things
that the Romas ate all the time and sometimes lived and sometimes died. I put them
in my pack and I bring them back to the town.

I will make everyone try to eat everything.

I will make sure that no more babes are ever put down again.

I will find Minerve and be with her.

I will spread the word.

And that will be the new Way.

DYSTOPIAN LITERATURE FOR YOUNG ADULT READERS IS
enjoying a surge in popularity these days—which, in turn, has prompted a veritable
flood of newspaper and magazine articles attempting to explain
why
. Some people argue it’s because today’s teens are inheriting a world plagued by problems
of a global scale unknown to previous generations. A taste for dark, dystopian tales,
they say, is simply a natural response to growing up amid the great disasters of our
age: 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the Indian Ocean tsunami, the Japanese and Haitian earthquakes,
the BP oil spill, the melting of the polar ice caps, etcetera, etcetera.

But other people point out that this is nothing new;
every
generation has its disasters and apocalyptic fears. The two of us grew up, for example,
with “duck-and-cover” drills in elementary school to “prepare” us for nuclear attack…while
our
parents lived through childhoods shaped by the ravages and aftershocks of World War
II. For as long as dystopian books have existed, generations of readers have been
devouring them—although in the past, when the Young Adult publishing field was a whole
lot smaller than it is today, teens usually had to raid the Adult fiction shelves
in order to find it.

Of all the explanations proffered for why teen readers respond so strongly to dystopian/postapocalyptic
tales, we like Scott Westerfeld’s the best. Scott, of course, is the author of the
Uglies series—which are books that, along with Suzanne Collins’s
The Hunger Games
, deserve a large slice of credit for establishing YA dyslit as a genre to be reckoned
with. In an essay for “Dystopia Week” on the Tor.com Web site, Scott said:

“Teenagers’ lives are constantly defined by rules, and in response they construct
their identities through necessary confrontations with authority, large and small.
Imagining a world in which those authorities must be destroyed by any means necessary
[as per dystopian fiction] is one way of expanding that game. Imagining a world in
which those authorities are utterly gone [as per postapocalyptic fiction] is another.”

If you’re a longtime reader of dystopian fiction, you’re probably already familiar
with the genre’s history, but for those of you who have just discovered the field—perhaps
through
Uglies
, or
The Hunger Games
, or another YA dystopian book—you might be interested in knowing a bit more about
where this type of fiction comes from.

The history of dystopian fiction begins with its polar opposite,
utopian
fiction: tales that envision a better world and more perfect society. The word “utopia”
itself (from Greek roots meaning “no place” or “good place”) first appeared as the
title of a fantasy novel (or so it would be called today!) by Sir Thomas More, the
great writer, philosopher, statesman, and Catholic martyr of sixteenth century England.
More’s
Utopia
is the story of a traveler to an imaginary island country where private property
is unknown, women are educated alongside men, and religious tolerance is, if not perfect,
then at least more advanced than it was in More’s own time: all radical ideas that
were safer to couch as fiction than to espouse in real life. Although utopian texts
existed long before More coined his famous name for them (such as Plato’s
Republic
from the third century b.c.), it was More’s book that went on to inspire the great
utopian tales of the nineteenth century (which critics have dubbed “the utopian age”):
Erewhon
by Samuel Butler,
Looking Backward
by Edward Bellamy,
Gloriana
by Lady Florence Dixie,
News from Nowhere
by William Morris, and many others. These, in turn, directly inspired the birth of
the
dys
topian genre.

The first recorded use of the word “dystopia” (derived from Greek roots meaning “bad
place”) comes from a political speech by John Stuart Mill in 1868, who used the word
to describe utopia’s opposite: a place where attempts to create an ideal society had
gone badly awry. (He was talking about the English government’s land policy in Ireland.)
When we turn from politics to fiction, although we can find dystopian elements in
a number of early texts, dystopian fiction as a
genre
does not begin until the nineteenth century, where it emerged in reaction to those
utopian books so beloved by Victorian readers. Distrustful of the bright, lofty visions
conjured by Bellamy, Morris, and the other utopianists, writers such as Anna Bowman
Dodd, Ignatius L. Donnelly, Eugen Richter, and H. G. Wells published popular books
in the opposite vein: dark, satiric, cautionary tales of utopia gone wrong. Most of
these writers are forgotten now—except, of course, for the great H. G. Wells, for
it was Wells who established the dystopian genre as literature (and not just polemic)
with now-classic books like
The Time Machine
(1895) and
When the Sleeper Wakes
(1899). The prolific Wells also wrote utopian novels—such as
A Utopian Tale
(1905) and
Men Like Gods
(1923)—which had only mixed critical success and are rarely read today. Aldous Huxley,
in fact, disliked
Men Like Gods
so much that he sat down to write a parody of it, producing his now-classic dystopian
novel
Brave New World
(1932), set in a futuristic land of consumerism and technology pushed to soulless
extremes.

Although less well known than the novels of Huxley or Wells,
We
by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1924) is another classic of early dystopian literature: a chilling
tale set in a bleak totalitarian society inspired by the author’s experiences during
the Russian Revolution of 1905. Zamyatin’s novel, in turn, profoundly affected a young
English writer and journalist named Arthur Eric Blair, who would go on to become the
most widely read dystopian writer of all time. We know him better under his pen name:
George Orwell, author of the dystopian masterpiece
Nineteen Eighty-Four
(1949)—a book so terrifying, powerful, and prescient that it’s been embraced by readers
of every generation since, despite the fact that the year 1984 has long since come
and gone.

After Orwell (and perhaps because of him), from the 1950s onward, the dystopian genre
grew exponentially, with a dizzying number of excellent books found both on the mainstream
literature shelves and on the science fiction shelves (where teens were especially
likely to spot them), including
Fahrenheit 451
by Ray Bradbury (1953),
Lord of the Flies
by William Golding (1954),
The Chrysalids
by John Wyndham (1955),
Harrison Bergeron
by Kurt Vonnegut (1961),
Make Room! Make Room!
by Harry Harrison (1966),
Stand on Zanzibar
by John Brunner (1968),
The Lathe of Heaven
by Ursula K. Le Guin (1971),
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
by Philip K. Dick (1974), and
The Handmaid’s Tale
by Margaret Atwood (1985), to name just a few. (If you’re unfamiliar with
any
of these books, please seek them out. You’ll be glad you did!)

In the 1980s and 1990s, a new form of dystopian fiction emerged: tales written specifically
for young adult readers, adding younger protagonists and coming-of-age themes to a
genre that many teens had already embraced in its adult form. Recommended early works
of YA dyslit include
The Green Book
by Jill Paton Walsh (1981),
Futuretrack 5
by Robert Westall (1984),
The Devil on My Back
by Monica Hughes (1984),
Children of the Dust
by Louise Lawrence (1985), The Obernewtyn Chronicles by Isobelle Carmody (begun in
1987), The Giver Trilogy by Lois Lowry (begun in 1993),
Shade’s Children
by Garth Nix (1997)…and too many other fine books for us to even begin to list them
all. (Google “Young Adult Dystopian Fiction” and you’ll find many good lists of these
older works.)

By the early years of the twenty-first century, YA dyslit was well on its way to becoming
the exceptional field that it is today, with a wide variety of authors exploring dystopic
themes in many, many different ways. The explosive growth of the field has been helped,
of course, by the commercial success of books by M. T. Anderson (
Feed
), Paolo Bacigalupi (
Ship Breaker
), Malorie Blackman (
Naughts and Crosses
), Suzanne Collins (
The Hunger Games
), Cory Doctorow (
Little Brother
), Nancy Farmer (
The House of the Scorpion
), Patrick Ness (
Monsters of Men
), Carrie Ryan (
The Forest of Hands and Teeth
), Scott Westerfeld (
Uglies
), and other best-selling authors. But some of the new up-and-coming dyslit writers,
too, are producing good work that promises to push the field into new directions in
the years ahead—including some of the lesser-known writers published in this book,
whose novels we encourage you to seek out.

Of course, when any field enjoys popular success, speculation promptly begins on just
how long such a “fad” will last—with the doomsayers insisting it will all soon be
over, or is over already. Here’s our prediction: modern dyslit is not disappearing
anytime soon because it’s not a passing fad, it’s a literary form. And it’s a form
that is still evolving—that is not even
close
to finding its limits yet—as it shapes itself to the hopes, fears, dreams, and nightmares
of each new generation.