and lower down it notes:
YA dystopias teach children to submit to the free market, not fight authority
The Hunger Games, The Giver and Divergent all depict rebellions against the state, and promote a tacit right-wing libertarianism.
Yeah. It complains it's not like the "good old days" when HGWells supported Stalin, and influenced the SciFi writers to posit left wing ideas and take over the sci fi establishment.What marks these dystopias out from previous ones is that, almost without exception, the bad guys are not the corporations but the state and those well-meaning liberal leftists who want to make the world a better place. Books such as The Giver, Divergent and the Hunger Games trilogy are, whether intentionally or not, substantial attacks on many of the foundational projects and aims of the left: big government, the welfare state, progress, social planning and equality. They support one of the key ideologies that the left has been battling against for a century: the idea that human nature, rather than nurture, determines how we act and live. These books propose a laissez-faire existence, with heroic individuals who are guided by the innate forces of human nature against evil social planners.
Hoyt has a lot of complaints about the difficulty of publishing such sci fi on her blog and how the trade associations dislike those who oppose their line of thought.
She is an immigrant from Europe and recognizes this as a way that the experts control their population: How dare they criticize the experts!
They’ve – by which I mean the cultural establishment – tried to bring the same here. I’ve railed here before about how cozies were – in effect – blacklisted by the publishing establishment because “amateurs can’t be better than the professionals.” And how my books couldn’t have funny policemen because “Policemen are professionals and must be respected.” And I’ve talked about how shocked I was when a bunch of high school kids came to beat me on my blogbecause I’d criticized their teacher (I actually hadn’t. I’d criticized the curriculum which is is not teacher set, but they lacked the semantic ability to distinguish these) and how dare I? She’s a TEACHER. I’m supposed to respect her. (She also was considerably less educated than I, much younger and I have reason to believe she sent the kids over to harass me – the harassment stopped when I threatened to scan in some of her (outrageous) grading handiwork and post it. – which leaves me in doubt of her moral character.)and how does one learnabout American culture? She says by reading Heinlein.
While these things annoy me and shock me, as does anyone preventing my questioning him by saying “I’m the expert” – it is still new here.
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