Two essential parts of the Young Adult genre are dystopias and protagonists who are, well, young. Decades before franchises like The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, and Divergent, there was a '70 sci-fi movie that in many ways is the ancestor of YA as we know it. The entire premise of Logan's Run is that there are only young adults inside the dystopian future city where they all reside. When they turn 30 years old, a tiny crystal in the palm of their hands blinks red, and then it's time for life to end — unless they attempt to flee to a supposed safe haven known as Sanctuary. Occasionally brilliant, occasionally convoluted, Logan's Run is a 50-year-old sci-fi cult classic that was ahead of its time despite being so clearly a product of the '70s.
A somewhat loose adaptation of William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson's 1967 sci-fi novel, Logan's Run escaped years of development hell and hit theaters on June 23, 1976, in part because the studio made substantial changes to the book. The age when life must end was raised from 21 to 30, the outside world is more post-apocalyptic, the nature of the Sanctuary the runners attempt to flee to got a drastic overhaul, and the ending is totally different. In the book, Sanctuary does exist, and the identity of one character is revealed to be someone else entirely. Not to mention, the larger world is basically intact, just totally bizarre. The book was also born out of the 60s youth movements, and the idea that the then-young baby boomers would outnumber the older population.
