Read The Unofficial Hunger Games Companion Online
Authors: Lois H. Gresh
The Unofficial Hunger Games Companion
1
The Hunger Games Trilogy: Surviving the End of the World
2
Repressive Regimes and Rebellions: Could the Hunger Games Really Happen?
3
Hunger: Starving in the Districts
4
Tributes: Gladiators in the Arena
5
Weapons: How Tributes Survive
6
Torture and Execution: What a Way to Go
7
The Nature of Evil: President Snow and His Cronies
8
Killer Kids: How Responsible Are They?
9
Hype Over Substance: A Mirror of Modern Times
10
Theseus and the Minotaur: Parallels
11
Survival Instincts and Strategies: Does Katniss Know What She’s Doing?
12
Medicines and Poisons: Simple and Complex
13
Muttations and Other Hybrids: Birds, Beasts, and Roses
14
More Weird Science: A Brief Roundup
The future of an old prophetic legacy
Suzanne Collins,
The Hunger Games,
Scholastic, Inc., 2008; edition referenced throughout
The Hunger Games Companion
is the first paperback printing, September 2009.
Suzanne Collins,
Catching Fire,
Scholastic, Inc., 2009; edition referenced throughout
The Hunger Games Companion
is the first edition, September 2009.
Suzanne Collins,
Mockingjay,
Scholastic, Inc., 2010; edition referenced throughout
The Hunger Games Companion
is the first edition, September 2010.
References to Web sites may have changed or disappeared between the time this book was written and when it is read.
I
n dystopian post-apocalyptic novels, a remnant of humanity survives against the odds in situations 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 an 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.
