https://www.npr.org/2014/08/16/340170478/lois-lowry-says-the-giver-was-inspired-by-her-fathers-memory-loss

I’ve been coming across interviews with different authors as I’ve been doing research about how authors view their own works. It’s interesting to see how many really don’t want to call their novels a work of science fiction.

Attached is a piece of an interview with Lois Lowry about the giver– she responded similarly to Margaret Atwood about how she classified the genre of her book.  Lois Lowry states she “didn’t think of it as futuristic or dystopian or science fiction or fantasy,” and the interviewer expands, explaining how Lowry said “it was just a story like so many of her other ones, about a kid making sense of a complicated world.” Here, Lowry doesn’t seem to object to the work being called science fiction because there’s a lack of the stereotypical robot or alien, but because she seems to view the world she’s created on a smaller, more personal scale.