It’s tricky to get the tone of a dystopia just right. Done well, they can be searing insights into contemporary inhumanity, but make them too blunt and the lesson becomes ham-handed. A simple premise is usually the most effective; there’s a reason Nineteen Eighty-Four’s story of an authoritarian government is iconic, but a dozen overly-complicated YA dystopias have faded into the history books. “Look how awful humans are once the human experience is completely rewritten to be fundamentally miserable” isn’t much of an observation.
