Rootless blog/ Dystopia

The main character of Rootless, Seventeen-Year-Old Banyan, lives in this world. Banyan works as a tree builder, making fake trees out of scrap metal, and selling them to the rich who want a taste of what life was like before the trees went missing.

I have really been enjoying reading dystopian novels lately. 'Dystopia' refers to an imperfect world where the threats or problems happening to it and it's inhabitants are an extreme version of the treats and problems we are faced with today, reality based problems. In the case of Rootless, the problem is climate change, global warming, and the destruction of nature.

Other novels I have read, like The Hunger Games series, The Maze Runner series, and The Eleventh Plague are also dystopian-themed novels that take the life we know to extremes and give us a warning of what could happen if we don't make the right decisions. The themes of those books are our obsession with the media, and coporate control; preventing global warming; and an oil crisis. These are all subjects that we are familiar with, taken to extremes.

The reason that I like dystopian novels so much, compared to science fiction novels, is how real they can feel even though they are far away from what we have experienced. They make me think of what possible future we could have. Whereas Sci-Fi takes familiar structures of life to extremes by adding fantasy elements like aliens or space ships or life on other planets. I feel that dystopian novels make people think about the effect they can have on our world. Our actions today can change our tomorrow.