Tomayto. Tomahrto.

My mum is a Brit but I mostly grew up in the States. She says ‘tomahrto’. I say ‘tomayto’ unless I am visiting the UK and then I make a special effort to say it their way. Now, having also grown up in Canada where they sometimes use Brit pronunciation I say ‘bahsil’ rather than ‘baysil”.

In NY I had to practice saying it with the ‘ay’ sound when I went to the Italian deli where they also annoyed Italian me by dropping the vowels off the ends of words. Excuse me, but all those ‘O s’ and ‘I s’ and ‘A s’ are what makes the Italian language so miracoloso! Mozzarella vs. Mozzarell.

So you can see how confusing it all is.
But look what you get if you put them all together! And now I am hungry….

However this post is not about pronunciation. Nor is it about herbs (pronounce the ‘h’, dammit) or even about fruits masquerading as vegetables.
It is about the confusion surrounding the terms dystopia and post-apocalyptic.

You may know that I have a YA, ASHES,ASHES, coming out on June 1 2011.

It is a post-apocalyptic adventure story but it is frequently lumped into the dystopian genre. I’m not complaining loudly because dystopian is HOTHOTHOT right now.

The way I see it, the word has become sort of a catch phrase for all YA which takes place in a future world that is different but not so different from our own. All the bad bits of the modern world are ratcheted up a few notches. So you get more governmental control, for instance. And perhaps sex is outlawed.
It’s that mix of realism and fantasy which is so appealing.

However I do think it’s important to know the difference.
Often an apocalyptic event is what brings about a dystopian society. So, a global war perhaps. Or a pandemic. Something big that threatens the human race with extinction. Mean aliens, maybe.
And usually the story begins years or centuries afterward when our way of life from before is almost forgotten.
The way I think about it is:
The Handmaid’s Tale, The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Forest of Hands and Teeth are dystopian. There is ORDER.
Life as We Knew It, Ashes, Ashes, Swan Song are post-apocalyptic and somewhat apocalyptic as well. The bad stuff is still happening. There is DISORDER.
After the apocalypse things are a mess, usually for a good long time.

I was interested in how people would rally after 99% of the world population was dead, and global warming was ravaging the environment. I wanted to see how people would behave without technology, without much social structure, and without peace-keepers or authority figures. It would be my hope that post-apocalypse there would be a chance for a re-do, to make things better for everyone, but we are doomed to repeat history, are we not?, and there always comes a point where there is a power struggle for dominance or control and this is what brings about a dystopia.

Here are the short dictionary definitions:
Dystopia
–noun
a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding.

Apocalypse
-any universal or widespread destruction or disaster: the apocalypse of nuclear war.

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