The Unofficial Hunger Games Companion (41 page)
Read The Unofficial Hunger Games Companion Online
Authors: Lois H. Gresh
R
eally, what
are
muttations? At first, we think they’re dead tributes that the Capitol has somehow engineered into hybrid killing beasts. They have the eyes of dead tributes, along with their faces and their hair. One even has a collar marked with Glimmer’s district number on it. Yet I couldn’t help but wonder while reading in
The Hunger Games
about the wolflike muttations
how
they could be resurrected dead tributes.
The muttations are some of the most horrifying aspects of the series, especially when we’re still wondering how Rue could turn into a wolfish mutt with hatred glowing in her eyes. How can this be?
To be honest, I also wondered why Katniss had never seen these human-tribute types of muttations in the broadcasts of earlier Games.
All that aside, we eventually learn that, just like the genetically engineered mockingjays, these human-wolf muttations are made in the lab. They’re not human; they’re not resurrected dead people. They’re artificially created animals. Just like the monkey muttations in
Catching Fire,
the human-wolf muttations are programmed to kill people.
There are the human-wolves, strange human-lizard monsters, the monkeys, the jabberjays, the mockingjays, and the tracker jackers.
The idea of artificially created animals, engineered in laboratories out of the flesh of multiple creatures, is one that’s been around for over a century in science fiction literature. Way back in 1896, H. G. Wells wrote his classic novel,
The Island of Doctor Moreau,
in which upper class Edward Prendick is saved at sea by a man named Montgomery. Onboard Montgomery’s ship are a wide variety of animals, including a bizarre beast-human servant named M’ling.
When the ship finally reaches its destination, a remote island, Montgomery and the crew refuses to let Prendick onto the beach. Unfortunately for Prendick, the ship sails back out to sea, and he’s allowed onto the island, where he meets Doctor Moreau, who is performing mysterious scientific research involving the animals.
When Prendick hears the shrieks of pain coming from Moreau’s lab, he runs into the jungle and discovers a group of beast-humans. When one of the hybrid creatures attacks him, he escapes back to Moreau’s enclave, and the next morning, sneaks into Moreau’s secret laboratory. There he finds a weird beast-human in bandages, and he races back into the jungle, where he comes across a colony of hybrids. The leader is known as the Sayer of the Law, and the law itself requires that the beast-humans not act like wild animals. Prendick, horrified that Moreau will carve him up and also turn him into a beast-human, tries to flee to the ocean, where there would be no escape from the island anyway. Moreau eventually explains that he’s not carving humans into beasts; rather, he’s turning animals, the Beast Folk as he calls them, into human form. He has been performing his experiments for eleven years, he says.
There’s a lot more to the story of
The Island of Doctor Moreau,
and if for some reason, you’ve never read the book or seen the original film (
Island of Lost Souls
featuring Charles Laughton and Bela Lugosi), you should. There are ape-humans, leopard-humans, hyena-swine-humans, and just about every other hybrid imaginable. Eventually, after killing the pure humans on the island, the hybrids revert to completely wild form.
The beast-humans in H. G. Wells’s novel (and in the film mentioned above) have human eyes that reflect intelligence and sensitivity. It’s not hard to imagine, as Prendick does for so long, that Doctor Moreau has been grafting humans into animal hybrids rather than vice-versa.
In The Hunger Games series, the muttations also have human eyes and other features that make them appear to be mutated versions of the tributes that Katniss has encountered in the Games. If Doctor Moreau did it in 1896, then why can’t the Capitol turn animal and human flesh into strange hybrid monsters that have human characteristics, but are wild beasts at the core?
Splicing and dicing isn’t necessarily the way to make these bizarre hybrids. The term
transgenics
refers to the creation of embryos containing genes from other species. Specifically, “Not only can a foreign gene be put into the cells of an organism: the gene can actually be incorporated into the DNA derived from germ cells or embryonic cells of another organism. From this combination, an embryo can be produced that contains this gene that came originally from another species (called a transgene). Transgenic embryos can be put into an adult female . . . which will then give birth to [offspring] permanently carrying the transgene.”
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Once you accept the concept of transgenics, you can easily imagine its applications. For example, someday we might teach toddlers about new kinds of farm animals. In addition to the traditional cows, lambs, chickens, and pigs—kept onsite for that old-time feeling—Old MacDonald’s Farm will now showcase fields of docile pig-lambs, horse-chickens, petunia-cows, and lion-peacocks. It’s not as silly as it sounds. Pigs will be bred to have wool coats. Sheep may have bacon-flavored meat. Chickens may shed their feathers for light horse-down, and horses may taste like Thanksgiving turkeys. Tuna-textured cows may smell like flowers rather than manure; cows may indeed serve as a source of fish, complete with all the vitamins and nutrients and none of the fat found in traditional beef. Lion manes may look like peacock sprays. And it’s also conceivable that female horses may give birth to horse-chickens and petunia-lambs.
2
The types of animals that are most easy to manipulate from a genetic standpoint will be the animals used as “genetic stock.” For example, if it turns out that pigs are best suited for genetic engineering, then we’ll see far more pigs than other animals in the “genetic stock” pastures or barns (or warehouses, laboratories, dungeons, prisons—wherever humans produce these poor animals; we can only pray that we’ll allow animals to live in reasonably pleasant environments). On the other hand, if horses are better suited for genetic engineering, then horses will be in abundance instead of pigs.
If we genetically engineer animals to suit our purposes, then in the long run we may find that we’re destroying entire species, such as the original “pure” pigs, horses, cows, and so forth. If we “manufacture” pigs that are miniature assembly plants of other animals, then the real pigs that cannot give birth to peacock-lions or tuna-cows will go the way of the dodo: extinct. It’s a danger. Or will the last real pigs be in zoos? Will Old MacDonald’s Farm become merely an historical exhibit of stuffed dead animals at the Smithsonian?
What I’m suggesting, and what the world of The Hunger Games portrays, isn’t as farfetched as you might think. Horrifying: Yes. Realistic: Unfortunately,
yes
.
An article in
National Geographic
warned in 2005 that “Scientists have begun blurring the line between human and animal by producing chimeras—a hybrid creature that’s part human, part animal.”
3
The report noted that as early as 2003, Chinese scientists fused human cells and rabbit eggs; that in 2004, the Mayo Clinic created pigs that happened to have human blood instead of pig blood.
In 2010, the Arizona State Senate enacted a law that makes it illegal to create beast-human hybrids. The law relates to embryonic research, as in transferring nonhuman embryos into human wombs or “transporting or receiving for any purpose a human-animal hybrid.”
4
If you want a few laughs, check out http://blogs.laweekly.com/stylecouncil/2010/06/human-animal_hybrids_top_7_now.php, which asks, “Is something weird going on in Arizona? Or are they just being preemptive? In Arizona, Dr. Moreau is not just a creepy guy, he is a class 6 felon.”
5
Now-illegal hybrids cited by the
LA Weekly
blog include The Little Mermaid (fish-human), Firenze (horse-human) from Harry Potter, and the poor Wolfman.
As
National Geographic
notes:
. . . creating human-animal chimeras—named after a monster in Greek mythology that had a lion’s head, goat’s body, and serpent’s tail—has raised troubling questions: What new subhuman combination should be produced and for what purpose? At what point would it be considered human? And what rights, if any, should it have? There are currently no U.S. federal laws that address these issues.
6
If we’re heading toward beast-human hybrids, will we have giant red roses that smell so potent and sweet that they’re nauseating? Of course. Giant roses are possible due to transgenics, and certainly, fragrance requires minimal tinkering. If President Coriolanus Snow needs hyper-sickeningly-sweet roses to cover the reek of blood from his mouth sores, genetically engineered roses would do the trick.
About the genetic engineering of roses, in particular, Michael Gross, who has a doctorate in physical biochemistry, writes:
[Researchers] have isolated thousands of pigments from the petals of different varieties of roses, characterized them, tracked down the enzymes involved in their synthesis, and the physiological co nditions required for the proper coloring. After all of this, it dawned on them that blue roses cannot be bred as a matter of principle. All roses known lack the enzyme that would convert the common intermediate dihydrokaempferol to the blue delphinidine-3-glucoside. The only way out of this dilemma is to transfer ‘blue genes’ from different plant species. The DNA sequence encoding the enzyme in petunias could be identified and transferred to petunia mutants whose enzyme was deficient. In principle, it should be possible to transfer the gene into roses as well, and provide them with blue petals.
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As an aside, plants—whether genetically engineered or naturally occurring—have appeared in dystopian post-apocalyptic novels as the root cause of the actual apocalypse. Forget zombies that eat human bodies. Enter John Wyndham’s human-killing triffids (
The Day of the Triffids,
1951). In Wyndham’s dystopian view, humans pushed the boundaries of crop cultivation to feed an ever-growing population while satellites began circling the globe (this was written in 1951, after all). Lo and behold, with nobody really knowing where they came from, millions of triffid seeds floated down from the sky and planted themselves in soil all over the world. They were intelligent, and they ate people. Imagine for a moment: If we can make genetically engineered plants such as gigantic sickeningly sweet roses, we can also make flesh-eating plants. Such plants are known in nature, and cooked in a laboratory, we may end up with triffids some day. This isn’t how Wyndham described the origin of his triffids in 1951, but in a far-future Earth, one never knows.
Finally, if we can manufacture animal hybrids and totally new types of animals in the lab, someday we might have bird muttations such as jabberjays and mockingjays. The jabberjays operate as spies, hearing and repeating conversations, used initially by the Capitol as weapons against the people. The mockingjays are the result of the mating of these jabberjays with mockingbirds. Again, this isn’t as strange as it sounds. The genetic construction of the jabberjay could indeed include the possibility of mating with mockingbirds.
As for replicating sounds, birds in the wild—real birds that haven’t been genetically altered in any way—are very attuned to vocal sounds and learn melodies at an extremely young age.
Some real birds, such as parrots and parakeets, can replicate human words. In fact, there’s a parrot named N’Kisi that reportedly knows anywhere from 560 to 950 human words. According to
USA Today,
the parrot’s abilities to communicate with humans are impressive, though along with many other sources,
USA Today
isn’t quite so sure about the purported telepathic capabilities of the bird.
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(If you had a parrot who could have conversations with humans, would you also claim a telepathy angle? Isn’t it enough that the bird possesses such an amazing vocabulary?) Many researchers with impressive credentials do point out that parrots do far more than mimic sounds: They can analyze and think before they “speak.”