This guest post is by Sharon Sant, whose new dystopian novel, Runners, came out on 7 June.

The Oxford dictionary defines dystopia as: ‘an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one. The opposite of Utopia.’

That sounds like a perfect place to set a novel.  And it seems that I’m not the only one who thinks so. I’ve been reading reports for some time now about how agents and publishers are sick of dystopian novels landing on their desks.  According to them, since The Hunger Games, we’ve gone dystopia crazy. I hate to burst that industry bubble, but I don’t think that dystopia is going away any time soon. In fact, I don’t think it was ever really missing from the cultural landscape in one form or another. Thinking back to novels like 1984, even as…