Day 3 of the Apocalypse! Phoebe North, author of Starglass

In my early days on GoodReads (almost three years ago), when I was still too shy to review or participate in discussions, Phoebe North was one of the few people I followed and admired from afar and she inspires admiration to this day. As a reviewer, she is intelligent, insightful and entirely trustworthy, and I'm quite confident she's all those things as an author, too. Her debut YA Sci-Fi novel, STARGLASS, is set to be released on July 23rd 2013. My copy has been pre-ordered for months. If you still haven't pre-ordered yours, enter to win a signed copy at the end of this post.

Why My Favorite Apocalypse Happened in New Zealand

I recently heard of a new YA dystopian novel that’s been optioned for film: Chris Weitz’s The Young World. But the premise—featuring a cataclysmic death that kills everyone over the age of 21—brought to mind a small screen series, one that’s been off the air since 2003 but which never the less remains one of my favorite works of young adult fiction.
I think I have TVTropes to blame; I was in graduate school and wasting way too much time on the site, obsessively reading about young adult novels that I’d loved when I was twelve, ostensibly as research for my coursework in children’s literature when I stumbled upon a description for a New Zealand TV show that I had missed when it first aired—what with being a college student living in the States at the time. It was called The Tribe and was described by my fellow tropers as follows:

The Tribe ran five seasons (1999-2003). It was a New Zealand-produced Cozy Catastrophe/Teen Soap Opera set Twenty Minutes into the Future, after an apocalyptic virus that wipes out the world's adult population, leaving the kids and teens to inherit an unnamed city that is rapidly degenerating into a post-apocalyptic urban wasteland.
The main characters are the Mall Rats, a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits who took up residence in an abandoned shopping mall. Over the series, the Mall Rats attempt to restore order to a chaotic world by reintroducing civilized functions like money and democratic elections. The Mall Rats face external and internal conflict with other tribes and between their own members, who don't always see eye to eye.
The first series was notably darker in tone than later series, and more survivalist-oriented. The first season also had very few of the "fantastic" elements that came to dominate later seasons, such as virtual reality, religious cults, insanely well-disciplined and organized antagonist tribes, and mysticism. The show dealt with many of the typical elements of both a Teen Drama with a setting that was part Scavenger World and part Cozy Catastrophe, including problems like pregnancy and bulimia. It also mostly averted Dawson Casting.

Cozy catastrophe? Teens living in a mall? I knew I had to watch it, and rushed to the youtubes:

I was . . . a bit surprised by what I found. For one thing, the theme song was terrible. I had expected corny acting and low production values—I’m a fan of the original Degrassi, after all. But the show itself was just strange: it was dark and grainy, and some of the dystopian aspects were downright frightening.
But the episodes were short and it was easy to tear through them. And as I did, I began to get addicted.
What most impresses me about The Tribe, even now, is how honest a depiction of teenagers it quickly became. For one thing, the kids in The Tribe are wicked smart: they wrestle with notion of civilization building, laws, and justice in a world without adults. They figure out how to harness natural resources, how to lead their fellow kids, and how to reach consensus. But they’re also real, authentic teenagers, quite unlike anything you see on American TV.
For example, living in a world without grown-ups means that they let their creativity go wild; they smear their faces with make-up, dye their hair, and wear crazy clothes. To some, these acts of rebellion might seem strange in a world without adults to rebel against. But at the same time, it makes sense: one reason teenagers experiment with crazy clothes and hair is because it’s a way to show ownership of your body, to take control of yourself in a world where so much lies beyond your control. Though the teens of The Tribe don’t have adults to rebel against, their plague-gutted and chaotic world often seems uncontrollable to them.
The Mall Rats act authentically adolescent in other ways, too. For example, the show has often been compared to a soap opera due to the romantic elements. In fact, several of these relationships result in teenage pregnancies. This seems, to me, to be a very natural consequence of living in a world without adult supervision or, say, condoms. Other aspects of adolescent life likewise don’t stop because of the apocalypse: teens continue to grapple with problems of fitting in, bullying, grief, questions about faith and mortality. All set against a fantastic back-drop.
Though the show would later spiral out into less believable plotlines (with the virtual-reality obsessed Technos tribe taking over the city), at its peak The Tribe remains one of the finest works of YA apocalyptica to ever hit the small screen. Despite its occasionally campy nature and low production values, it was honest and very real. It treated its young characters like fully fledged people--showing that teens are capable of humanity even at the end of the world.

Phoebe North received an MFA in poetry at the University of Florida. She lives with her husband and cat in New York State. Visit her at PhoebeNorth.com.



Phoebe has generously offered to send out a signed copy of Starglass to one lucky winner. Just enter the Rafflecopter below and keep your fingers crossed. This giveaway is open to US residents only.

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