Colleen O'Rourke blog post 3

In Thomas Moylan's Preface, he talks about how "Dystopian narrative is largely the product of the terrors of the twentieth century." This indicates that dystopias in Moylan's day were based on bad things that people in the past have always worried about. This concept does not apply today in Veronica Roth's Divergent and several other modern dystopias of the 21st century. They are based on terrors of the future that most people have not thought if yet. Divergent takes place in Chicago, Illinois in the distant future. Much of the city and the land outside of it was either falling apart or destroyed all together. The government had also successfully made everyone in society fit themselves into 5 factions: erudite, dauntless, amity, abnegation, and candor. They go into detail about their past (our present) during the faction ceremony. "'Decades ago, our ancestors realized that it is not political ideology, religious belief, race, or nationalism that is to blame for a warring world. Rather, they determined that it was the fault of the human personality-of humankind's inclination toward evil, in whatever form that is. They divided into factions that sought to eradicate those qualities they believed responsible for the world's disarray.'" This is not something from the past that haunts our thoughts today, rather, it is a future terror that could possibly happen.