Ask the Author: Barnaby Taylor
Answered Questions (1)
Barnaby Taylor
Hi Clare, thanks very much for your questions. The short answer to your first question is my long-standing love of films and video games. Films and games have been an enormous part of life since my early teens and I always remember the first film I ever saw on VHS was Romero's Dawn of the Dead. I was gripped then, and have been ever since, by the sheer sense of narrative adventure that the apocalypse in this film afforded its characters. There is something fascinating about one world ending and another one beginning.
I get the same feeling from certain games I have been playing, especially a zombie-survival-building game I have been playing for the last few years called 7 Days to Die. This is an open-world game which allows for one's imagination to really take flight and tell your own story as you go along.
As for dystopians teaching young readers to distrust adults, I think you are probably right. There is an inevitability that this distrust has always existed between generations and is evident in all sorts of genres. For example, generational conflict is at the heart of the films of my favourite director, Yasujiro Ozu, but his films are a million miles away from being seen as dystopian.
It may well the case that dystopian worlds are potentially easier places to examine this distrust of adults as it is almost always the case that the children and young people themselves are not responsible for the dystopian worlds that they find themselves in. There may well be exceptions to this last point but I think it generally would stand up to scrutiny.
I get the same feeling from certain games I have been playing, especially a zombie-survival-building game I have been playing for the last few years called 7 Days to Die. This is an open-world game which allows for one's imagination to really take flight and tell your own story as you go along.
As for dystopians teaching young readers to distrust adults, I think you are probably right. There is an inevitability that this distrust has always existed between generations and is evident in all sorts of genres. For example, generational conflict is at the heart of the films of my favourite director, Yasujiro Ozu, but his films are a million miles away from being seen as dystopian.
It may well the case that dystopian worlds are potentially easier places to examine this distrust of adults as it is almost always the case that the children and young people themselves are not responsible for the dystopian worlds that they find themselves in. There may well be exceptions to this last point but I think it generally would stand up to scrutiny.
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