Science fiction, which aside from Young Adult fiction is the most relevant genre here, looks back to the 1950s as its “Golden Age”. This was the period in which SF historians and purists would argue that the genre had the most energy, produced its most important and innovative writers and works, and made the biggest leaps in its growth as a literary genre and as a unique environment for human creative curiosity. The other crucially important period in SF history is the New Wave of the 1970s which included writers like J. G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock, and which opened SF up to more modern, socially and culturally aware themes and settings.
By the 1990s SF was, in the mainstream, reduced to spaceships and aliens again. Even the arguably most successful and important SF movie of the 1990s, The Matrix (1999), was an almost Tarantino-style mash-up of ideas borrowed from the works of Philip K. Dick with action scenes inspired by the violent choreography of 1970s kung fu films, all re-packaged in skin-tight PVC outfits and sunglasses indoors, the edgy aesthetic of the day.
The only original thing here was the combination of elements, not the created work itself. In SF literature, one of probably the most famous and successful writers of the 90s was Iain M. Banks with his Culture series of novels, who had a simultaneous career as a writer of popular literary fiction under the name Iain Banks.
The 1990s saw in SF as well as in most other genres of pop culture media an increased presence of women working in fields which had usually been associated with men. While there had always been women writers of science fiction, including some of the most admired and respected writers in the field (notably Octavia Butler 1947–2006 and Ursula LeGuin 1929–2018), and the creator of the genre was a woman (Mary Shelley, with Frankenstein in 1818), the genre of science fiction has always been widely viewed as something by and for boys. During the 1990s this changed dramatically.
Lois Lowry’s venture into science fiction came in the early 1990s: she had never written in the genre before. Her approach to science fiction is not particularly true to the genre, and it is only when she began to expand on the world of The Giver with the sequels, years later, that she seems to have concentrated more and put more thought into the structures and systems of her imagined future world.
But her novel arrived at a time when young adults – teenagers – were being increasingly discovered and targeted as customers and readers. So The Giver could be marketed and sold as a children’s book, or, as they were then becoming known, as YA fiction, rather than as science fiction.
The processes of hybridisation which were changing pop music and mainstream cinema were having a different effect in the world of literature. Books were being marketed in an increasingly sophisticated way, echoing the traditional marketing of pop music for particular audiences (the most important American music charts, for example, have long been subdivided into categories like “rock”, “country” and “R&B”, targeting the different relevant audiences specifically).
The pressure for publishers and booksellers to market new books to existing target audiences has always resulted in a large amount of generic fiction – books which are written to fulfil existing expectations on the part of the reader. Many of the YA dystopian fantasies which have appeared since the huge success of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games (2008–2010) have been little more than attempts to sell as similar a story as possible to the same readers, for example, and J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (1937–1949) created an entire genre, with literally hundreds of authors in the years since working in exactly the same style and using exactly the same themes and storylines.
Lowry’s The Giver is an unusual example of a book which has ancestors – Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) is an obvious one – without being an attempt to reproduce or imitate, and which has been both critically acclaimed and wildly popular, and yet has not produced imitations. Its contemporary background is interesting but actually less relevant to the book itself than is frequently the case, in particular for dystopias or SF, both being genres which by their very nature often tend to reflect on the environment in which they were created. As she explains in her Newbery Medal acceptance speech in 1994, the roots of The Giver go much further back than the contemporary world in which she wrote it – 1990s America – into her childhood in Japan and through the 1950s and 1970s[3]. The success of The Giver can be attributed in part to increasingly sophisticated marketing processes which allowed it to benefit from the growing exploitation of the YA fiction target audience, but its enduring power and success have to do with the fact that it is a book rooted in a much deeper past than the USA of the 1990s.
| 2.3 | Notes on Other Important Works |
ZUSAMMENFASSUNG
Lowry has written more than 40 books for children and young adults. She has won and been nominated for many prizes for her work, including the most prestigious awards in the field of children’s literature, including the Hans Christian Andersen Award and the Newbery Medal (twice). Her most famous, popular and acclaimed books are The Giver (1993) and Number the Stars
Many of her books have been multi-volume series, like The Giver, which became a quartet, and the Anastasia series for younger readers, with nine books written between 1979 and 1995. She has also written several stand-alones and an autobiography. Her most recent book was Gooney Bird and all her Charms (2014), the sixth title in the Gooney Bird series for younger readers.
Lois Lowry has written too many books to present them all in this study guide, but here is an overview of a few of her most important published titles.
The Giver Quartet
Lowry says of the “sequel” to The Giver that she imagined a world “of the future […] one that had regressed instead of leaping forward technologically as the world of The Giver has”[4]. All of the books are set in the same world, but each one has a different protagonist.
She has often been asked why she waited so long – or why it took so long – to continue the story begun in The Giver. In her Newbery Medal acceptance speech she uses the metaphor of a river and its tributary streams to describe the accumulation of ideas and inspirations for a story[5]. When asked about the last book in The Giver quartet, she uses a cooking metaphor:
”I very often have things brewing for a long time... It’s as if on another stove somewhere, in another house, a soup or a stew is cooking, and from time to time I tend to it and toss in a different herb or sprinkle some pepper into the pot and let it return to its simmer. The book that is now called Son (for years it had no title) was like that. It was there, it was Gabe’s story, it was started, and it needed time to simmer.”[6]
Gathering Blue (2000)
Kira is a girl born with a deformed leg. The society she lives in gets rid of its weak or disabled members. Normally she would have been sent to the Field, where she would have become a victim of The Beasts, but she has a talent for embroidery and begins to learn the art of dyeing colours. The only colour no one knows how to make is blue, which has been lost. She learns more about the secrets of the world around her (like Jonas in The Giver). The end of the book includes hints that a boy from another community has blue eyes (an implied reference to Jonas).
Messenger (2004)
This book follows the story of a character from Gathering Blue called Matt (or Matty) who is a Messenger, carrying news and messages between settlements. He is a friend of Kira’s in the earlier book. In Messenger we learn that Jonas has survived and is Leader of a community, and that Gabe is also still alive. It is set roughly eight years after the events of The Giver.
Son (2012)
When asked why she