Dystopian fiction almost like utopia to many young readers

It was more than 15 years ago that kids started reading again.

British author J.K. Rowling came out with her first book about an 11-year-old boy who learned he had magical powers. By the time her seventh book about Harry Potter came out, Rowling was a billionare, the books had been translated into 67 languages and there were more than 400 million copies of them in print.

Well, seven Harry Potter books and eight movies are in the past now, and the kids who grew up reading about him are now in their teens and twenties.

They're still reading, and what's fascinating about it is that there is a whole new genre growing up -- or at least expanding vastly -- for young adult readers. Starting in 2008 with "The Hunger Games" trilogy from Suzanne Collins, moving on to Michael Grant's six-book "Gone" series and more recently Veronica Roth's "Divergent, Insurgent, Allegiant" trilogy, young adult readers seem fascinated with dystopian fiction.

Of course there's dystopia and then there's dystopia. Grant's series -- to me the weakest of the three -- opens with everyone 15 or older disappearing from a small California coastal town. Then those remaining are cut off from the rest of the world by some sort of dome.

Not a terrible idea -- ask Stephen King -- but Grant starts getting a little too weird when he gives some of the characters special mental powers. "Gone" is the only one of the three series cited here that didn't hold my interest enough to finish it.

For one thing, it wasn't really dystopian. Once the dome came down, the kids of Perdido Beach would just rejoin the real world.

Roth's books are actually the most dystopian. They're the only ones in which the society that came before is essentially gone.

Everyone growing up in the city -- which once was known as Chicago -- is assigned to one of five groups based on predominant personal characteristics. There's Abnegation, Amity, Candor, Dauntless and Erudite.

The problems are with people who are divergent, people who have the qualities of two different groups. Some might be brave (dauntless) and smart (erudite), or loving (amity) and self-sacrificing (abnegation).

The problem with these books is there isn't enough back story. We don't know how the society became the way it was, and there really isn't any central authority to rebel against. I have yet to read the third book, but it'll take a pretty big comeback to salvage.

So far, at least, "Hunger Games" seems to be the best. The 2012 movie grossed more than $400 million just in the U.S., and the second one -- "Catching Fire" -- opens this Friday.

My guess is it will do as well or better as the first, and the only real disappointment to me is that they've already decided to milk the series for everything they can. Just like Harry Potter, the final book in the series will be split into two movies.

Dystopian fiction is hardly new. Books like "Earth Abides" from 1948 are timeless, and King's "The Stand" is a modern classic.

But if you look at the recent dystopian series that have been so popular, they seem to have come along at a time when young adults are at their most pessimistic about the future. Kids coming out of college with massive student loan debt, kids looking at millions and millions of jobs that have vanished never to return, you can understand why they might not like our idea of the future.

If I were 22, I might feel the same way.