Blog Post 3- Wade Blair

In Moylan's "Preface" he discusses the impact of Dystopias from the 20th century. Mainly focusing on dystopian novels that have talked about bad historical events. But where "Preface" differs from Veronica Roth's Divergent is this novel takes place in the future. When Moylan discusses "this negative narrative machine has produced challenging cognitive maps of the historical situation by way of imaginary societies"(xi). Explaining my claim of how these two are different he clearly states Dystopias of the 20th century focus on the "historical situation". But in the novel Divergent Roth takes a different approach of placing her imaginary society in the future. Touching on subjects that our generation has yet to even see. Roth focuses in on how people can tear down a society using an example would be "We can't be confined to one way of thinking, and that terrifies our leaders"(442). Using mainly about 3 people in her novel she shows that being different in her futuristic society is heavily feared. Moylan needs to consider how just a few people can cause something to go bad in a dystopian society. Instead of focusing in on how an economic system or a whole government can be torn down. He needs to consider just who or what is causing these societal issues to fall.