Dystopian heroines lesser known than Katniss Everdeen and Tris Prior
Wanted a small exercise in drawing very different kind of people, using the heroines of amazing dystopias I can recommend, and got a bit carried away.
Tally Youngblood – Uglies Series (Scott Westerfeld)
Mischievous, lonely, but also a bit naïve and sheltered Tally wants nothing more than to be made Pretty, to fit in, to be how she should be. As she meets the unconventional Shay, these ideas get challenged, and for a while, the two carve out every little bit of freedom their world allows them. Then Shay vanishes, and the suddenly not that friendly and utopian anymore government forces Tally to find her.
Uglies has this nice dreamy, almost utopian feeling to it, but you always sense that there is something horrible in the background. But the heart of the series, also in the two following books, is Tally and Shays quite real feeling, somewhat homoerotic (sadly only implied though, not canon) and very dysfunctional relationship. This was one of the first YA dystopias to get big, and even predates The Hunger Games, but is not as famous anymore, even if this year a movie finally will come out. Sadly, despite Tally in the books being chubby to fat, at least in the first book, and her ethnicity never stated, they cast a thin white actress for her though. 1
Sonmi-451 – Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)
Sonmi was created as a servant in a fast food chain, but despite being as quiet as she was meant to be, she also is curious and smart and seeks justice, and as she wants more of her life than that, she ends up in a conspiracy that could end the rule of the companies governing Neo Seol.
Sonmis tale, told as an interview before her execution, is one of six stories in Cloud Atlas. I love stories of clones and androids coming into their own and realizing that they are people, and this one was one of my favorites as a teen.2
Ria – Die Verratenen (Ursula Poznanski)
Ria, a genius at rhetoric and at reading people, and always rational, is one of the leading students in sphere Hoffnung. But then she finds out about a planned assassination of her and five others, and is forced to flee into the ice-cold wilderness outside and has to bargain with the clans living there. The clans again and again attacking supply trains between the spheres. It turns out there is more to the hostility of the two groups than the spheres let her think. But they are still in danger…
A german book, I remember reading this down in one big train journey. There is always just another cliffhanger, you can’t lay this book down. The criticism of elitism and first world-third world divide is interesting too.3
Aster Grey – An Unkindness of Ghosts (Rivers Solomon)
Smart and adaptive enough to be a healer, but stern and socially awkward enough to be somewhat of an outsider even among her peers on the lower decks of a racially segregated generation ship, Asters life is already hard enough, trying to protect her mentally ill former lover and now best friend Giselle, healing people along with Theo, the bastard child of a higher decks general, avoiding the brutalizing raids. Then she finds new leads about the mysterious death of her mother, and is thrown into the power struggle among the white leaders.
This is not a light read. The discrimination and abuse Aster (and Giselle, and to an only slightly lesser extent Theo) faces, for being black, for being female, for being autistic, for being bi and nonbinary is incredibly intense and the book painfully shows every bit of it. Still, the world felt vivid and real, and Aster is a quite unique heroine. I also felt quite seen in her as a bi autistic woman.4
Mia Wiedemann – Sternenschimmer (Kim Winter)
Optimistic and kind, Mia wants to help in a refugee hostel for the refugees of an civil war on the planet Loduun. She falls in love with Iason, a cold and stern refugee still traumatized from the war, but soon tension between humans and aliens rise, and also the conflicts of the civil war follow the refugees to earth.
More a love story than a dystopian, Sternenschimmer still captured my heart as a teen because it managed to describe how vulnerable and strange and painful first love feels quite well. The worldbuilding is also quite vivid, and I like the humor.5
Also sorry that I don't have more queer heroines, except for Aster, none of them are canonically queer, even if Tally and Shay do seem to be bi, but aren't actually canonically confirmed. Bought another book with a queer heroine, but it turned out to not actually be dystopian.
(trigger warnings below the line)
