The dystopian genre, which is usually a subcategory of science fiction, first emerged as a response to the utopian genre. While utopias feature an idealized vision of society, each dystopian plotline delivers a uniquely flawed and oppressive society—one that is often, but not always, set in a post-apocalyptic future time. Foundational dystopian novels include George Orwell’s 1984, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and (arguably) Karel Capek’s War with the Newts. These works explore the various ways in which malignant governments harm the lives of individual citizens.

The thematic concerns of dystopian fiction began to take on an even darker tone in the late 1950s as science fiction writers grappled with the threat of nuclear war. These existential concerns are vividly featured in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Walter M. Miller Jr.’s Canticle for Leibowitz. In the 1970s, writers began to use dystopian fiction to explore more diverse forms of political theory, a pattern that can be seen in the anarcho-syndicalism that dominates Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. In the 1990s, dystopias such as Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower expanded on the issues examined by their predecessors, dealing with the deeply fraught topics of climate change, fascism, and the use of Christianity as a method of control.

How I Live Now is a metaphorical child of these titles, but unlike its literary ancestors, the narrative never reveals the exact details of the sociopolitical realities that cause the near-future world war at the center of its plot. Instead, the protagonist merely offers a wide variety of theories and ideas about the dynamics that might have led to this sudden occupation of England by an unnamed enemy. The narrative’s ultimate goal is to focus on the impact that this future world war has on teenagers and children. Because the entire story is told from the first-person perspective of a teenage girl, the devastating world events are filtered through her naïve viewpoint, her visceral need to survive, and her ultimate goal of rebuilding the new home that she came to cherish in the weeks before the war. 

Notably, even Rosoff’s novel, published in 2004, has entered the annals of science fiction progenitors, given that it has paved the way for other young adult dystopias such as The Hunger Games (2008) and Divergent (2011). These novels, like How I Live Now, each feature a young woman as the protagonist and describe her efforts to survive in a world of existential dangers and rigged systems. Additionally, all three titles have been adapted into films. The movie adaptation of The Hunger Games was released one year before the adaptation of How I Live Now, and the adaptation of Divergent was released one year afterward. This broader pattern illustrates the rise of YA dystopian literature during the early 2010s.