If the chance to live forever came with a price, would you opt in or out?

It depends on the price, of course. In this book, the price is “no children.” The world’s resources are stretched to the limit in providing for all of the people who “opt in” to take Longevity, a drug that prolongs life indefinitely. There’s no room and there are no resources for children. Children who are born illegally to parents who have signed The Declaration, agreeing not to reproduce, are called Surpluses, and they have no rights, not even a right to life.

Anna is a Surplus. She doesn’t even have a surname, just Surplus Anna. Her purpose in life, if Surpluses can even have a purpose, is to learn to serve Legals, to become a Valuable Asset doing housework, yardwork, and and any other services that Legals disdain but need to have performed. She must serve in order to pay back society and Mother Nature for the unfortunate accident of her birth, for the drain she is on the Earth and its legal inhabitants.

The story reminded me of both P.D. James’s Children of Men (Semicolon review here) and of Margaret Peterson Haddix’s series that begins with Among the Hidden (Semicolon review here). I think these books constitute a fascinating sub-genre of dystopian novels with the theme of a world without children, or a world where certain children are illegal and unwanted. The fascination, for me, lies partly in the fact that these novels are deeply pro-life. In The Declaration, the “good guys” say things like “every life is valuable” and “there is no such thing as a Surplus.” In Children of Men, a world without any children is a dying world full of desperate people looking for meaning and finding none. In Among the Hidden the Shadow Children are, again, shown to be worthy people with a right to live and with gifts that the world needs. I think it’s encouraging to see a pro-life message like this embedded in popular, well-written fiction.

Do you know of other novels that would fit into this list?

Dystopian Novels With Pro-Life Themes

1. Children of Men by P.D. James

2. Shadow Children series by Margaret Peterson Haddix

3. The Declaration by Gemma Malley

4. Unwind by Neal Shusterman. (I found this one with a google search and added it to my TBR list. The description is intriguing.)

There’s a sequel to The Declaration, called The Resistance, coming out in September, 2008.

Oh, I found this list while googling, too: Gemma Malley’s top10 Dystopian Novels for Teenagers

AngelMonster is the fictionalized story of the turbulent relationship between sixteen year old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley, who had already eloped with another sixteen year old, Harriet, and had become tired of his first child-wife, sought another in Mary Godwin, daughter of a pioneer feminist mother and a philosopher father. When Mary and her lover, Shelley, ran away together, they took with them their accomplice in arranging their secretive trysts, Mary’s step-sister, Jane. Mary was pregnant with Shelley’s child when the trio absconded.

The tone of the novel, and apparently of the Shelleys’ lives, is histrionic with the characters, Mary, Percy Shelley, and Jane-who-later-changes-her-name-to-Claire, taking turns making “scenes.” Their way of life is immoral, purposefully iconoclastic, and hysterically passionate. Such choices in lifestyle naturally lead to jealousy, fits of anger and violence, depression, and wild, undisciplined exhibitions. Bennett’s Mary Shelley alternates between thinking Shelley is her angel and her saviour, and considering him to be her demon, monster, and betrayer. Add to the lack of restraint and the promiscuity of their lives a succession of tragedies: two suicides of close family members, the deaths of four out of five of the Shelleys’ young children, and the book becomes almost unbelievably tragic as one cataclysmic event follows another, spiced with doses of laudanum and liberal amounts of alcohol to dull the pain and confuse the issues.

AngelMonster is an excellent portrayal of the slavery that results when all of the rules of God and man are flouted, and only one’s passions are allowed to rule. Whether or not the author meant to write a cautionary tale, the story cannot help but warn that emotion is an inadequate governor of life’s choices. Sad, essentially true, and recommended for mature young adult readers.

The Indian Serenade by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low,
And the stars are shining bright;
I arise from dreams of thee,
And a spirit in my feet
Hath led me – who knows how?
To thy chamber-window, sweet!

The wandering airs, they faint
On the dark, the silent stream;
The champak odors fail
Like sweet thoughts in a dream;
The nightingale’s complaint,
It dies upon her heart,
As I must die on thine,
Oh, beloved as thou art!

Oh, lift me from the grass!
I die! I faint! I fail!
Let thy love in kisses rain
On my lips and eyelids pale.
My cheek is cold and white, alas!
My heart beats loud and fast:
Oh! Press it close to thine again,
Where it will break at last!

And so we begin National Poetry Month with the Poetry of Romantic Melodrama, but beautiful nonetheless.

I gave this book to Dancer Daughter and to Organizer Daughter to read after I finished it because I liked it so much. They read the blurb on the back of the book and informed me that they weren’t interested in a book about an alcoholic family nor in a book about a little girl who tries to enter Narnia. I tried to tell them that the book wasn’t really about either of those topics, even though it contains those elements. I’ll try again here.

A Door Near Here is the story of Katherine, Douglas, Tracey and Alisa. Katherine is only fifteen years old, but since her mother went to bed with a bottle, literally, Katherine is the only one left to hold the family together. The four children can’t turn to their estranged and remarried dad because:

a) he has a new family now and doesn’t want to know that the family he abandoned is in trouble. Dad just pays his child support and stays far away.
b) Alisa, the youngest and most vulnerable of the children, isn’t Dad’s child. She was born after Dad left, and he’s not interested in her at all.

So Katherine knows that if she wants to keep the family together, if she wants to protect her mother, if she wants to take care of Alisa, she must be the adult and, above all, keep her mother’s alcoholic breakdown a secret. It’s obvious from the beginning that this forced foray into responsible adulthood will never work. Even kids, reading how Katherine tries to figure out how to make the food stretch and keep the bills paid and get the kids and herself to school everyday and keep it all a secret, will realize that the plot is doomed. Superwoman couldn’t pull it off. But Katherine tries, and it’s morbidly fascinating to read and see how, whether, they will pull themselves out of this mess.

Then, there’s Alisa. Eight year old Alisa copes with the breakdown of her family by writing letters to C.S. Lewis. By reading the Narnia books over and over and over. By trying to find a door into Narnia where she believes she can find a cure for mom. Of course, Katherine knows Narnia is a fantasy, and she’s fairly sure C.S. Lewis is dead. But how do you deal with a beloved little sister who believes, who needs to believe?

This book is well worth finding. It was published in 2000 by Delacorte as the winner of its prize for a first YA novel. Unfortunately, it also appears to be Ms. Quarles’s last novel. I can’t find that she’s had anything else published since 2000.

TadMack at Finding Wonderland: “It is a powerful and heartfelt book which, for reasons of its authentic voice and timeless truths, cracked my heart when I first read it in 2001. The MFA thesis of author Heather Quarles, this book combines a family story and an exploration of belief to create a book painful in its clarity.”

Dona Patrick at Revish: “The book, A Door Near Here, is not the light fiction/fantasy I was expecting. It is a very heavy story about alcoholism that resulted in child neglect. It is about four siblings who stuck together and survived a very nasty part of their lives.”

Julie Berry: “Exceptional realism grappling with parental abandonment and neglect, and a haunting, lovely tribute to Lewis and his legacy. Strongly recommended.”