When people talk about classic dystopian novel for young readers , the same titles come up again and again : The Giver . City of Ember . A few others . But one classic book in that subgenre deserves a lot more love : House of Stairsby William Sleator , librarian Mina Hong tells io9 .
https://gizmodo.com/10-great-novels-that-arent-about-what-you-heard-they-we-1679984927
compose Hong :
I cogitate William Sleator ’s Koran The House of Stairs is fairly underrated . It was published in 1974 .
To briefly sum up , the book takes place in an unspecified dystopian hereafter . Five adolescent are place in a house with stairs leading nowhere . A machine rewards the teens with food pellets whenever they give away each other . They imprint alliances and use sex and violence to manipulate and harm one another in Holy Order to get these food pellets .
I think it ’s pretty easy to draw parallels between the infamous Milgram experiments in the 1960s and what happens to the characters in the Holy Writ . I think the cultural environment at the time was filled with distrust against the government and other institutions .
What I find to be unexpected is how relevant this book is today . When I think of set people in one environment and pay back them for forming alliances and then betraying them , I think of reality tv set and how altogether manipulated those “ realities ” are . Of course , reality television did n’t exist in Sleator ’s time but like many sci - fi writers , he was very forward - thinking .
The House of Stairs is also a forerunner to many popular , contemporary dystopian novels such as The Hunger Games and Divergent series where teens are manipulated by grownup to harm / drink down one another . Science fiction is good at using melodic theme of reality television to muse expectant estimate about order . Ray Bradbury ’s Hellenic Fahrenheit 451 also used this idea to some level , showing how character were able-bodied to participate in their own world shows in rules of order to distract them from politics and thus make them more pliable citizens .
Booksya fiction
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