Lois Lowry on 'Building 903,' 'The Giver' and relationships between the old and young

Andrew Limbong (0:02)

Hey, it's MPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Louis Lowry is on the pod today. You know the name. She's written dozens of books for kids and young adults. There's a historical fiction book, Number the Stars, about the Holocaust, on the lighter side of things. There's the Anastasia Krupnik series. And of course, she wrote The Giver, one of the most well-known dystopian fiction books kids read. That series became a quartet, which wrapped in 2012, and she hasn't done another book set in a future dystopia until now, with her book, Building 903 I caught up with her on the Baltimore stop of her book tour before she was set to speak to a room full of parents and kids. We talked about why she wanted to return to a dystopian future, how kids all over the world are still responding to The Giver, and whether or not that's a good thing. That's all ahead after the break.

Building 903 takes place in 2099, a sort of despotic ruler named Zulkiris is in charge. There's a lot of no's in this world. No music, no pets, no art, no books.

Tell us a bit more about this world that we're in.

Lois Lowry (1:07)

Well, obviously 2099 is a long way from now. I can't do the math quickly, but it's quite a distance into the future, and things have greatly changed, largely because a leader has become an autocrat and has found a way to corrupt the electoral system, and has been elected for many, many decades. It's fair to assume, I think, that by that time, 2099, people's life expectancy will be much longer, and he is over 100

And so the people hate him, but they don't know how to get rid of him. And over the decades, he has changed the way the world works. He has changed to, in my opinion, their detriment. But some things perhaps might be good. It's interesting to speculate what might work in the future and what might not. And all of that is in the book.

Andrew Limbong (2:03)

Were you thinking about anything going on in the real world as you were imagining up this?

Lois Lowry (2:08)

The thing that propelled the whole beginning of the book was my concern, as we see in Read About Now, of literature beginning to disappear. Colleges, I can't speak for the college I went to, but many colleges are no longer giving humanities as a major. And they're not any longer high schools as well, no longer using complete books. Kids are reading excerpts from books. And my life with literature has been such a long connection and so important to me that that began to feel, that prospect began to feel so painful.

And I began to envision a world without books. And in this world, they've been illegal for so long that not only the young protagonists, teenagers, have never seen or felt or touched or opened or smelled or read a book, but nor have their parents. So it's been a generational deprivation.

And I began to think about what that would do to a world.

Andrew Limbong (3:18)

The book follows Tessa, a 14-year-old girl. Her twin brother Theo has been missing for some time now. But one of Tessa's closest friends is an elderly neighbor named Miriam. When Miriam gets sent away to a facility for the elderly, Miriam slips Tessa a key to some boxes of contraband she'd been hiding. In the boxes are some old newspaper clippings, a catcher's mitt, and here's Lowry reading.

Lois Lowry (3:41)

Each of the remaining boxes was filled with books. They were different sizes, different colors. One was quite thin with a brightly colored picture on the cover.

Tessa opened that one, glanced at a random page and read aloud. One Sunday morning, the warm sun came up and pop, out of the egg came a tiny and very hungry caterpillar.

Colors are nice, she said, looking up. But I don't really understand what it's talking about. Well, her mother replied after a moment. It was a very long time ago, and things were so different then.

Andrew Limbong (4:22)

Can you talk a little bit about writing that moment of, since she'd never seen a book before, it's wonder, but it's also confusion, it's excitement, but also, there's some fear there.

Lois Lowry (4:34)

She also, incidentally, has probably never seen a caterpillar, or a butterfly. So much has been lost.

But I think what isn't ever mentioned by name, I don't think, in the book, I could be wrong about that, is what's really been lost is the power of imagination. And so this child, not really child, teenager, cannot read a piece of fiction and envision what it's talking about. She's lost that capacity. And, of course, this word I know is not mentioned in the book, but it's implied. When we lose that power to imagine ourselves into the being of another creature, another human, or in fact a caterpillar, we lose the capacity for empathy. And that's the thing that's going to destroy us in the future if we let it.