SURVIVING THE END OF THE WORLD
In dystopian post-apocalyptic novels, a remnant of
humanity survives against odds ranging from nuclear wars to
environmental meltdowns; invasions by aliens, zombies, and
other monsters; plagues; chemicals; genetics gone wild;
supermassive black holes that devour us; earthquakes;
volcanoes; and even human-eating plants. Many of these
scenarios are man-induced horrors: the nukes, biological and
chemical wars, genetic engineering, global warming,
pollution, corporate and government greed. In the real
world, if a few people survive such as apocalypse, then
there's only one way to completely obliterate the human
race: The survivors must kill each other off.
Enter author Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games and its
two sequels, Catching Fire and Mockingjay. While the first
two books in the series focus on annual gladiatorial Hunger
Games and then the Quarter Quell, the third book is
essentially about war. Originally aimed at teens aged twelve
and up, the series quickly grabbed hold of everyone: twelve,
thirteen, fourteen, twenty-five, thirty-five, fifty. It
doesn't matter how young or old you are, the messages are
the same. If humans aren't careful, we may blow ourselves
into oblivion by wars, cruelty, the lust for power, and
greed. Children are the future of the human race. If we kill
our children, who will be left?
What better way to make these points than to postulate an
apocalypse followed by war and rebellion, and then to pit
the losers' children against each other in the Hunger
Games—annual battles to the death? As if the Hunger Games
don't kill enough children, the Capitol then pits the
survivors against each other in the Quarter Quells.
In general, dystopian post-apocalyptic fiction is wildly
popular these days. The novels are bleak, dismal, poignant,
sad. These aren't comedies. The genre tends to send the
warning that, if we don't wake up and stop killing each
other, if things don't change—and soon—we might face the
nightmares of the characters in the books.
Suzanne Collins's warnings are dished out to us up front
and close as if through a magnifying lens. She gives us a
heroine, Katniss Everdeen, who is remarkably like many young
girls hope to be: She's brave, considerate, kind,
intelligent, quick-witted, courageous, and very resourceful.
Yet she lives in a world where all hope has been lost, where
people eat pine-needle soup and entrail stew just to
survive; where Peacekeepers beat and whip her neighbors and
friends for nothing more than hunting and sharing
much-needed food; where children are selected each year by
lottery to slaughter each other in the Hunger Games, a
gladiatorial arena that merges the ancient Roman games with
reality television. Truly, this is a world in which the
term, “survival of the fittest,” has immediate and lethal
meaning.
The books are international bestsellers, and Suzanne
Collins has been applauded by everyone from Stephen King to
The New York Times Book Review to Time magazine. As of this
writing, more than 8 million copies of all three books in
the trilogy are in print. The first novel, The Hunger Games,
has been on The New York Times Bestseller List for 130
weeks. Suzanne Collins is one of Entertainment Weekly's 2010
Entertainers of the Year. The books are #1 USA Today
bestsellers, #1 Publishers Weekly bestsellers, and top many
other prestigious literary award lists, as well.
By the time you start reading this book (the one in your
hands now), you'll be anxiously anticipating the first
Hunger Games movie. You may read The Hunger Games Companion
multiple times, especially after March 2012 when The Hunger
Games film is in theaters, with Lionsgate at the helm,
Jennifer Lawrence starring as Katniss Everdeen, Josh
Hutcherson as Peeta Mellark, and Liam Hemsworth as Gale
Hawthorne.
This book, The Hunger Games Companion, is an unauthorized
guide to Suzanne Collins's excellent trilogy. It examines
all the subjects that I find fascinating about the books,
topics not covered anywhere to date on the Internet or in
any other book.
I assume that readers of this book have already devoured
The Hunger Games series—many of you multiple times. I assume
you know the plots, you know about Katniss and Peeta and
Gale, about Buttercup and Prim and Rue, and so forth.
My goal is to generate discussion about The Hunger Games
trilogy: the characters, the settings, the storylines, and
also about subjects ranging from war to repressive regimes
to hunger to the nature of evil itself. Every topic is set
against the backdrop of and intertwined with The Hunger
Games books and characters.
For example, chapter 2 parallels the Capitol of Panem
with repressive regimes in our real world. Along with
detailed examples, I pose the question: Could the world
depicted in The Hunger Games really happen? Are we facing
Big Brother, the end of privacy, dehumanization, and too
much government control over our lives? Have the rich become
too rich, and are most of us much too poor? You'll be
surprised at the answers.
Another example: Chapter 4 draws direct and in-depth
parallels between the real gladiators in ancient Rome and
the tributes of Panem. While the Capitol is indeed evil to
send twenty-four children into the arena every year, the
ancient Romans were much worse: They killed many thousands
of men, women, children, and animals at a time using torture
techniques that go well beyond the horrors of The Hunger
Games trilogy. Their orgies and banquets were on par with
the Capitol's: They feasted and laughed, drank wine and
fussed with their clothing and hair while watching wild
beasts rip the genitals from naked men and women. And they
had their own Finnicks as throwaway sexual playthings.
And how about hunger? Is the starvation in all the
districts of Panem any different from starvation in our own,
all-too-real world? Is it possible to live on meager amounts
of grain and oil? In chapter 3, you'll learn how long a
typical person can exist on such small allotments of food
and the effects on children of this level of malnutrition
and starvation. If the Capitol needs the districts to
provide it with textiles, food, coal, and other goods,
shouldn't it feed its slave workers sufficiently to enable
them to work?
As for reality television, public relations experts,
paparazzi, fashionistas and stylists, and obfuscation of the
truth, chapter 9, “Hype Over Substance,” shows you how The
Hunger Games is a mirror of modern times.
In this book, you'll learn about the muttations and how
they might be engineered, the mockingjays and how they might
mimic elaborate melodies and sounds, the trackerjacker
poison and how it might work, and many other topics.
To open discussion among fans of The Hunger Games, this
companion guide offers opinions about matters relating to
the characters, their relationships, the storylines. For
example, I thought long and hard about Katniss's vote of
“yes” for a Capitol children's Hunger Games at the end of
Mockingjay. Later in this book, I'll provide my conclusions
and the reasons for them.
As another example, we'll discuss why Katniss becomes
suicidal and hooked on morphling in Mockingjay: Does it make
sense in the context of her personality in both The Hunger
Games and Catching Fire, and if so, why?
Before you dive into the rest of this book, pause and
indulge me for a moment or two. Let's start our entire
Hunger Games discussion with a look at the apocalypse that
presumably occurs before the opening chapter. How could The
Hunger Games apocalypse have happened? Where are the people
from all the other countries? Also, how far into the future
might The Hunger Games be?
These are the clues from Suzanne Collins: The seas rose
dramatically and “swallowed up so much of the land” that
people went to war over “what little sustenance remained”
(The Hunger Games, 18). District 13 was leveled by “toxic
bombs” (The Hunger Games, 83). Fearing war or complete
destruction of the Earth's atmosphere, the government
leaders planned to race to their underground city (now
District 13) (Mockingjay, 17).
My guess is that the author might be suggesting that an
environmental disaster caused the apocalypse. One
possibility is the melting of the ice caps. Various
scientists believe that the destruction of Earth's
atmosphere and the rise in carbon dioxide and other
pollutants may very well cause the ice caps to melt and the
world to flood.
If the world floods to this extent, then people in high
areas such as mountains might survive. Pockets of survivors
may be in the Himalayas, the Alps, the Andes, and elsewhere.
They may be in lowerlying areas such as the portions of
North America that survived the floods.
The Hunger Games shows us no Internet capability, no
satellites circling the globe. Due to the global war, I
assume that the satellites cannot be maintained. I assume
that survivors in other countries cannot communicate with
Panem, that the floods have destroyed the required
infrastructures, that shortwave radios possibly exist but
little else. If we remember that the Soviets jammed
shortwave radio transmissions from the United States during
the Cold War (so its citizens couldn't communicate with the
outside world), then it's an easy jump to think that Panem
has done the same thing. It's possible that the survivors in
other countries don't step in and help the citizens of Panem
because they have their own problems due to the
environmental apocalypse.
How long might it take for the ice caps to melt and flood
the Earth sufficiently to cause an apocalypse of this
magnitude? Maybe five hundred years from now? One hundred
years from now?
Scientists don't really have a definitive answer about
global warming and the melting of the ice caps. According to
Time/CNN, “By some estimates, the entire Greenland ice sheet
would be enough to raise global sea levels 23ft., swallowing
up large parts of coastal Florida and most of Bangladesh.
The Antarctic holds enough ice to raise sea levels more than
215ft.” Explains Spencer Weart, former director of the
Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of
Physics:
Specialists in glacier flow worked up increasingly
elaborate ice-sheet models. . . . The models failed to
answer the question of how fast a major ice sheet could
surge into the ocean. The improved models did show,
reassuringly, that there was no plausible way for a large
mass of Antarctic ice to collapse altogether during the 21st
century. According to these models, if the West Antarctic
Ice Sheet diminished at all, it would discharge its burden
only slowly over several centuries, not placing too heavy a
burden on human society
So let's suppose it takes a few hundred years for the
seas to rise 238 feet (23 feet from Greenland plus 215 feet
from Antarctica). If these speculations are accurate, the
world of The Hunger Games might take place several hundreds
years from now.
Keep in mind, of course, that other scientists provide
varying speculations about whether global warming will cause
this catastrophe at all, how high the seas might rise, how
long this could take, and what the consequences could be.
Debates rage all over the world about these subjects.
So hypothetically, in a few hundred years, we could have
a society with advanced technologies such as muttations,
force fields, and high-speed trains; but the world is
basically flooded.
The war after the apocalypse may have decimated the
cities and suburbs, as we see no evidence in The Hunger
Games books of skyscrapers, mall strips, gas stations, and
other buildings beyond the village square, the mayor's
house, the Victor's Village. We also see no rubble from
crushed buildings. It's possible that the trains have been
routed around the rubble, so tributes don't see cities where
people back home can hide and later rebel. This, again, is
all speculation on my part.
Having addressed the question of what might have caused
the apocalypse preceding The Hunger Games (and only Suzanne
Collins, her agent, and her editors know for sure what she
had in mind), I'd like to close this introductory chapter
with a few speculations about the end of the entire series:
What happens long after the Mockingjay war? Specifically,
why does Katniss marry Peeta and have children? This ending
surprised a lot of readers, myself included, and so I've
given it a lot of thought.
We first meet Katniss as a kindhearted and strong-willed
girl who must provide for her family: her mother, little
sister, Prim, and even (after an initial near-demise of the
cat) Buttercup. I like Katniss from the first page, and when
her best friend Gale is introduced, I also like him. Similar
to Katniss, Gale provides for his family, and the two of
them join forces to bring food home.
After being thrust into her first Hunger Games, Katniss
must pretend to share a romance with another boy, Peeta, and
this charade continues throughout Catching Fire. Peeta is
basically a selfless romantic saint with a backbone. Other
than when his brain is hijacked, he's completely devoted to
Katniss and her well-being.
Katniss and Gale remain good friends, but everything
changes after Katniss experiences the gruesome reality of
the Games. She's caught between the two boys—Peeta the
super-sweet, uber-devotional baker and Gale the super-macho,
childhood friend.
But in Mockingjay, Prim is killed by bombs, and we also
learn that Gale has become a bomb maker. Hence, it seems
that the author has set up a scenario in which Katniss can
never choose Gale as her lover-husband. The choice is made
for her: Peeta, or nobody.
I believed in Katniss as a three-dimensional (i.e., real)
character throughout the trilogy. She develops over time
from a fairly innocent and sweet young girl into a warrior
who tries to save herself and Peeta, to one who tries to
save everyone in all the districts. She is forced to become
a killer of other children, which permanently alters her
personality, as it would to anyone in the real world
subjected to the Games. She hardens herself sufficiently to
take on the role of the Mockingjay to save the people of
Panem. She does what she has to do. But it all takes a
serious toll on her, just as war takes its toll on many
soldiers. A teenager enduring what Katniss endures might
very well suffer from depression, suicidal thoughts, and
drug addictions. In the end, when Katniss realizes that
President Coin is no better than President Snow, there's no
way she can do anything other than to kill Coin. Her life
has not been pretty.
When Katniss marries Peeta and has children, the one
thing she swore she'd never do, is this Suzanne Collins's
way of telling readers that there's always hope at the end
of even the darkest tunnel? This is possibly the one bright
spot in an otherwise extremely bleak world the author paints
for us.
The bottom line is that The Hunger Games series is
powerful and brilliant. From the beginning, the prose is
luscious: “Prim's face is as fresh as a raindrop, as lovely
as the primrose for which she was named” (The Hunger Games,
3). The action is fast, the pace even swifter. Reading the
first book is like catapulting down waterfalls at top speed.
Katniss is drawn with precision clarity; possibly, more
distant in Mockingjay than in the first two books, but
ultimately, as mentioned above, very believable and
intensely sympathetic. The zaniness of the stylists and
fashionistas gives the reader a little relief from the
horrors, but overall, the books maintain a grim look at the
ugly face of humanity. There's no way that sprays, spritzes,
dyes, and plastic surgeries can erase that ugliness. The
juxtaposition of Capitol excesses against the impoverished,
starving masses is brilliantly drawn time and time again
through Katniss's eyes.
In short, these are some of the best books I've read in a
long time. They make me think about the human condition, and
that's the mark of fine literature.
If you're reading this book, The Hunger Games
Companion, then I suspect you feel the same way.