Interesting Maze Runner facts: James Dashner’s a-mazing series of dystopian novels
1. Although some fans have made comparisons between The Maze Runner and other recent young adult dystopian novels, the idea for the series came to its author some ten years ago. Many readers and moviegoers have noted the superficial similarities between The Maze Runner (Maze Runner Series)
and the most successful dystopian series of the last decade, Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games
trilogy. (We’ve offered some interesting Hunger Games facts in an earlier post.) Dashner has discussed the book’s genesis, which dates back to November 2005: ‘I went to bed, and somehow this idea popped in my head about a bunch of teenagers living inside an unsolvable Maze full of hideous creatures, in the future, in a dark, dystopian world. It would be an experiment, to study their minds. Terrible things would be done to them. Awful things. Completely hopeless. Until the victims turn everything on its head.’ The first novel, which establishes the world in which several further books are also set, is a cleverly plotted page-turner (Dashner is not afraid to draw on the cliffhanger device at the end of his brief, action-packed chapters), and the film adaptation garnered largely positive reviews.
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