The Declaration

Gemma Malley

Apparently (and there is not a bit of surprise in my tone here), young adult fiction is all about reproduction. Odds are that a dystopian future is going to be based on how reproductive rights are withheld, suppressed, or just plain bad. Ally Condie's Matched and Lauren Oliver's Delirium trilogies are great examples of this, and now with the Declaration, we get another version. In Malley's version, big-pharma has finally developed the "live forever" pill and society has accepted it as a natural good. What society then comes to realize is that if you actually live forever, you don't need kids and in fact, they become a burden to the global resource problem. So anyone who does not opt out of eternal life must sign the declaration, stating that that will not have kids. Of course there is an underground and of course, the protagonist is one of these kids that is born, considered "surplus" and sent away to an orphanage of sorts to be trained in the arts of service (because if they are surplus, they may as well be maids or gardeners, right?). Surplus Anna meets a new kid in the orphanage, begins to have her eyes opened and struggles to understand the world in a whole new way.

Probably the most interesting idea here is to really think about societal willingness to enforce limits on families as people do actually begin to live longer. Do these limits mean pressure to limit births, or reconsidering the value of living longer. "Who is really the burden?", asks Malley. Is it the aging parent who continues to consume resources, or the kid who is consuming additional resources? So while this is a second tier dystopian future novel, I continue to like the themes that the authors are raising as they look into our not-so-distant future and take a stab at the kinds of societal issues that we will necessarily be addressing.

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