Waiting On Wednesday (41) Upcoming Dystopian Fiction Sequels

As anyone who is at all familiar with the book blogosphere knows, the 3rd Hunger Games book, due August 24th, got a name (MOCKINGJAY) and a cover. I like the cover progression. It all looks very hopeful, no? (#teampeeta!) No summary as of yet, but we do know there won't be any ARCs *sobs*

The US version of Patrick Ness' 3rd book in the Chaos Walking trilogy, MONSTERS OF MEN, got a cover this week too. It's due Sept 28th in the US (and May 3rd in the UK).

I also just pre-ordered my signed copy of Carrie Ryan's THE DEAD-TOSSED WAVES, companion to THE FOREST OF HANDS AND TEETH (read my review of TFOHAT) which comes out March 9th. You can read a teaser excerpt on Carrie's website.

WIRED, the third book in Robin Wasserman's Skinned series comes out Sept. 14th. While I have my problems with the series (read my reviews), I still can't wait to see how it concludes. (Gotta love the tagline on this cover too!)

James Dashner's follow-up to THE MAZE RUNNER, called THE SCORCH TRIALS is set to drop October 12th. Megan from Po(sey) Sessions attended his reading of 2 chapters of TST at LTUE so if you really need a hint of where the series is going...ask her!

Next Wednesday, I'll preview some more upcoming dystopian fiction - standalones or new series.

Meanwhile, check out this great post by Diana Peterfreund on the definition of dystopias. I especially like this part:

If the idea of fantasy and science fiction is about holding up a mirror to real world issues, it helps if you can recreate the entire world of your story around that particular real-world issue. Do you want to talk about genetic engineering creating unfair class differences? Gattaca. Do you want to talk about ideals of beauty? Uglies. Privacy? 1984. Free will? Candor. Censorship? Farenheit 451. Third-world exploitation and getting desensitized to televised violence? The Hunger Games.

Like a scientist, the author of a dystopian work of fiction creates a set of very particular conditions within which he runs his human experiment.

And of course Publisher's Weekly's recent article - Apocalypse Now - about the popularity of YA dystopias is not to be missed.