As Katniss & Co. get ready to storm movie theaters this weekend with Mockingjay, the latest installment in The Hunger Games series, it may seem like a foregone conclusion that futuristic teenagers will have to battle an oppressive dystopian regime alongside their crushes.
But it wasn’t always that way. As TIME’s Lev Grossman wrote back in 2012 while exploring the history of the teen romance-dystopia genre in books and movies, until the 1960s — notably, with the release of the Tripod series by Christopher Samuel Youd — dystopia wasn’t for teenagers. Books like 1984 and Brave New World are seen as classics of grown-up literature; during the last 50 years, their analogues have usually been meant for teenagers.
But that doesn’t mean that the genre hasn’t changed further during that half-century:
Read the full article here: Love Among the Ruins
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Write to Lily Rothman at lily.rothman@time.com