A Peek Behind The Curtain

In which the author reveals why he wrote this book, and who inspired it.

Well, I guess I owe everyone an apology for this book, especially those unlucky few who have listened to me gripe, at length, about dystopian novels.

For those of you that haven’t, some context:

For years, I’ve sworn up and down I would never write a dystopia, and those oaths got louder and louder the further we got into the dystopian YA boom of the 2000s and 2010s that brought Uglies, The Hunger Games, City of Ember, Divergent, The Maze Runner, etc., etc. Fantastic though some of those books were, they all failed to do what I thought dystopias were supposed to do:

Show how humanity goes wrong, and how it might be set right again. A good dystopia need not be comfortable to read. It need not even align with the politics or beliefs of the author—or of the audience—in order to be worth the trouble of writing.

A lot of the dystopias during the boom were fantastic stories of adventure; of swashbuckling badassery, of system-smashing righteousness. Stick a young character in a world worth rebelling against, and let him or her run the table. They are, well, adolescent power fantasies, which are loads of fun insofar as they go. But as I read them, I found myself more and more...unsatisfied.

They had neither the relentless logic of 1984, nor the satiric wit of Brave New World or Farenheit 451, nor the gleeful brutality and moral darkness of A Clockwork Orange, or even the stark ennui of Fight Club (which, although it isn’t a dystopian novel, covers all of the same thematic and intellectual territory).

Of course, those were all novels written for an adult audience, and maybe (I thought), that was the problem. Maybe the politics of our day precluded publishing anything quite so challenging for the teenage audience. Children should be protected from the world, or so the thinking goes.

I don’t agree. This world is not always a beautiful shiny happy place, and the people who are now children are going to have to live in it—and to run it—one day in the not-very-distant future. And as I aged into a bracket where my neices and nephews were pinging through high school like so many pinballs, I started wishing I had a book to hand them, in addition to all the books that got handed to me.

When the world began unwinding in the months before the Coronavirus Pandemic (Covid-19, just in case there’s another one by the time you’re reading this), I found the story of Ern growing on my mind.

Dystopias are not some far-off thing. I’ve known too many people who lived in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and the Eastern European Bloc behind the Iron Curtain and the People’s Repubic of China. I’ve seen, up close, too many small dystopias created consensually by people looking for a better life. I grew up in one, myself. It’s very easy to imagine a culture in which your political enemies run the show, and think “Oh, how awful would that be!” It’s even easier to imagine that the world you live in could never really tip over into a hell-on-Earth...and yet it happens all the time. Regularly. And, usually, with the enthusiastic consent of the people that will soon be crushed beneath the wheel.

It’s a lesson that, in the 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, has nearly passed out of living memory. I thought it was time to look at it from the inside. To figure out what it is that makes a society go septic? What creates witch trials, and heresy hunts, and secret police? And, is there any hope of recovering once that bridge has been crossed?

Those earlier questions are for someoene like Doc. I may have ideas, but I don’t know that that’s enough justification to claim an opinion. However, on the latter issue, I am confident. A society can pull itself out of a nosedive into the abyss. I know this, because I have seen it happen. In Poland. And Romania. And Bulgaria. And, most importantly for the formation of this book, in the former Czechoslovakia, where a man much like Doc, a man named Vaclav Havel, led his countrymen to a bloodless revolution and a rebirth of hope for their civilization. His writings are worth reading.

My writings, on the other hand, are calling to me from the other side of this manuscript, so I’ll wrap up here.

This is my second adventure novel for teenagers, and I’m finding I quite like the genre. It’s my intention to do a new one every year until they stop being worth reading (which I’ll know when my editor says “your books suck, go away now”). The next one...well, I have four competing for my attention, so I haven’t decided which one it will be, or I’d give you a little teaser right here.

Thanks for joining me as I followed Ern through his dark places. May your journeys be less fraught, but just as filled with discovery, enlightenment, and joy. I hope to walk with you again next time.

-J. Daniel Sawyer

Author in Exile

July 2020