The 5th Wave Study Guide

Rick Yancey was born in Miami, Florida, in 1962. Although his father wanted him to be a lawyer, he took an early interest in writing. He went on to enroll in law school, but he dropped out after a year and took various jobs, including English teacher and community theater director, before ultimately going on to work at the Internal Revenue Service. While working there, he published his first novel, A Burning in the Homeland, eventually quitting to write full-time in 2004. He is best known for his various series of young adult novels, including the 5th Wave series, the Alfred Kropp series, and the Monstrumologist series. He also wrote a memoir about working at the IRS. He currently lives in Florida.

Although the world depicted in The 5th Wave is in the near future, it also has some basis in history. The novel draws parallels between the aliens coming to Earth and Christopher Columbus coming to the Americas for the first time. Like the aliens, European settlers used violence to get rid of the Native Americans in order to live on their land. Settlers also spread disease, sometimes intentionally, which wiped out a large percentage of the indigenous population, similar to what happens to the humans in the novel. The tactics of the aliens in the novel also draw on later genocides in history, with several details of Ben’s time at Camp Haven resembling a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. In particular, the mass executions and the disposal of bodies by incineration recall techniques the Nazis used during the so-called “Final Solution” to eliminate Jewish people. The novel also explores the issue of gun ownership, which was and still is politically contentious in the U.S. Much of the time, the novel seems to argue for the necessity of gun ownership, suggesting that citizens should arm themselves because they can’t trust institutions like the government or the army to protect them during a crisis. But the novel also depicts how widespread gun ownership can lead to distrust and increased violence.

The 5th Wave came out near the end of a trend in the publishing industry for young adult dystopian novels. It was positioned as a successor to widely popular series like The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and Divergent by Veronica Roth. The roots of the dystopian young adult novel go back even further, with Lois Lowery’s The Giver being one early example. Additionally, novels like Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, George Orwell’s 1984, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World also have had a major influence on the genre, even though they are not necessarily classified as YA novels themselves. Some novels that Yancey has cited as an influence include H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, which also deals with an alien invasion, and John Christopher’s The Tripods novels, which like The 5th Wave have a particularly grim tone. Yancey has also mentioned the influence of film on his writing, with The 5th Wave referencing alien-themed Hollywood movies by name, such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind.