By When I was a teenager I loved dystopian fiction. I was obsessed with the idea of the end of the world as we know it and how the people left after catastrophe would survive. I wanted to visit all kinds of different worlds with different types of societies and different means of living.
Part of that, for certain, was caught up in my religious outlook and my internal self doubt that I would slip up somehow and miss the rapture so as to be stuck behind on an earth that was living in the tribulation period, but aside from that, I was drawn to the plucky upriser, the person who stood up to the dystopia they found themselves in and rather than submitting to their fate, they fought back, they carved out their own place or stood up to an unjust system, rebelled against a corrupt government.
I guess I still am. I just never suspected that dystopia would be so easy to establish. No global calamity was needed, just a government run by people more concerned with money than the well being of its citizens.
Heh, when I first wrote the first draft of Through Shade and Shadow almost six years ago now, I considered it’s political plot to be too far fetched. No one would believe America could be torn apart that fast, even with an outside influence at work behind the scenes.
Now, here we are in a land where the president and congress are more concerned with corporate welfare and the well being of millionaires and billionaires than they are for the rest of the citizens, where safety regulations are swiftly becoming a thing of the past, where cities can poison their own people with lead with no consequences, where children can be mowed down with guns no other civilized country allows in the hands of its citizens and over the grieving of their mothers we as a nation shout about our rights to own these death machines.
But, just liked in all of those dystopian stories I read as a teenager, someone is rising up. Heroes are emerging. Resistance is beginning.
And just like in those stories, those heroes are teenagers. I know this plot.
Natalie J Case 