Words are magical. They’re all just combinations of the same 26 letters, but if you get enough of them together in the right order and season to taste with a handful of punctuation marks then you can change the world. That’s a powerful magic, and sometimes people in charge do not like that.

We tend to think of non-fiction titles as being the real movers and shakers when it comes to cultural change. While no one can deny that titles like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, have rocked the powers that be - political, religious, cultural, parents, police, pastors - works of fiction have been just as influential — so much so that at one time the Central Intelligence Agency actually had their own printing press devoted to books globally disseminating books banned by the Soviet regime: Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and George Orwell’s Animal Farm among them. We tend to think of banning and/or burning books as a relic of the distant past, or something that happens in repressive totalitarian regimes far away from our “enlightened” shores, public and school libraries around the United States are still forced to defend the materials shelved in their stacks. In celebration of Banned Book Week 2014, here are three well-known science fiction and fantasy titles that have been targeted by censors in 21st century: Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card 2012: A South Carolina teacher who read excerpts of Orson Scott Card’s science fiction classic to his junior high students was suspended from duty after the mother of one of the students complained that it was “pornographic”. The mother also asked local police to pursue the case as a criminal matter. Police declined and the teacher was eventually reinstated. Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman 2013: New Mexico mom Nancy Wilmott successfully lobbied to have Neil Gaiman’s urban fantasy Neverwhere removed from a local school’s required reading list. Wilmott was so horrified by the material that she refused to read an excerpt of the book while being interviewed by a local news crew. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins 2013: The inclusion of Suzanne Collins’s blockbuster first novel on a Jackson, MO school’s reading list was challenged by parents upset over the book’s violent themes. The school district bowed to pressure and removed The Hunger Games from their required reading list, but elected to retain the book in the school’s library.