The Unofficial Hunger Games Companion (43 page)

One major “wow” feature of The Hunger Games series are the high-tech shower, closet, and food dispenser that Katniss uses in the Training Center. She can choose more than a hundred options for her water, shampoo, oils, and sponges; and she can also instruct her closet to create clothing for her. Right out of the old Jetsons cartoon, she can mention the name of a tasty food, and within a minute, get a plate of it (
The Hunger Games,
75).

So how is all of this done?

I wrote a novel called
TechnoLife 2020
(ECW Press, 2001), in which Joe Leinster, my main character, uses a lot of smart devices: doors that recognize him and open; home butler systems that prepare foods and clothing; showers that adjust to his needs; surfaces that require no dusting.

By combining artificial intelligence, robotics, sensors, micro-machinery, distributed processing, and other technologies, scientists will create a wide variety of smart materials and devices over the next couple of decades. According to a company that specializes in creating them, smart materials are “any material that shows some form of response (often physical) such as mechanical deformation, movement, optical illumination, heat generation, contraction, and expansion in presence of a given stimuli, such as electricity, heat, light, chemicals, pressure, mechanical deformation, exposure to other chemicals or elements. The response may be useful in converting the applied energy into a desired motion or action.”
⁵

Smart devices are those that are created using smart materials and computer systems. For example, in
TechnoLife 2020,
Joe’s condo cabin comes equipped with an array of very sophisticated smart devices. Here’s one description of the wall in his living room:

And a few minutes later, when Joe steps into the shower, more smart devices shift into action:

Before long, our clothes will eat their own stains and odors, our houses will maintain perfect temperature and air flow, our paint won’t peel, and our metal tables, bikes, and cars won’t rust. We’ll have sensor systems that monitor environmental conditions—temperature, humidity, toxins, pollen, pollution, and so forth, and these systems will trigger the use of ventilators, air filters, water purifiers, and other mechanisms. Smart device systems in our walls, keyboards, and clothes will emit chemicals and medications that help us sleep, that stimulate or arouse us, that boost our creativity. These systems, worn perhaps on a belt or embedded in our skin, will monitor our health twenty-four hours a day. Indeed, smart implants may target and release medications, and may help control body functions and synthetic organs using biomembranes. Smart implants may produce hormones and aid in the repair of tissues.

If you’ve watched enough
Star Trek,
then you know all about holographic devices and holodecks. If you’ve visited a major museum, you’ve probably seen holographs.

In
Mockingjay,
the hand-held Holo is like a holographic GPS device that zooms in and out of a map, showing whatever is in specific locations. If you go to Google Earth, you can see 3D views of pretty much anything you want: oceans, surfing and diving locations, and even 3D-historical imagery that you can zoom and pan. You can go all over the world, street by street, and see whatever you want. Sure, we’re not looking at holographic images of Bombay, Hawaii, London, or wherever, but we can see if someone has a certain type of car parked in front of his house, whether he’s built a shack, and if a delivery van is down the street. The views set up all over the world via satellite are not real time, of course, as in
Mockingjay
’s Holo system. It seems that the Holo must use constantly current data to supply information about weapons/pods and people that are possibly hidden from view. (Why the holographic images are necessary is something I don’t quite understand, though I admit it’s cool.)

In short, holography records light emitted from objects, then reassembles the light later to display the objects in realistic simulations; as if interacting with a virtual reality system or playing a first-shooter 3D video game, the recorded holograph appears fully 3D to the viewer. Holography is an optical mechanism that’s been used since the 1960s.

In 2011, MIT created a streaming holographic television video made out of a Microsoft Xbox gaming Kinect camera. The results are rudimentary, but still, the effect is that of a real-time holograph.
⁶

If we set aside the mysterious reason for using Star Wars-like Holo imagery, we can easily see how 3D real-time images might be collected and displayed. Distributed micro-sensors could pick up images and transmit them to some central node, where they would then be collated and massaged by algorithms to display 3D realtime images.

A
s readers, we never learn much about why Katniss Everdeen lives in a post-apocalyptic world. We know that environmental problems caused some type of apocalypse, that a major rebellion took place seventy-five years ago, that the Capitol basically destroyed the population of Panem, and as punishment, divided them into thirteen districts and subjected their children to the Hunger Games to teach them all a lesson in obedience. As for the reasons behind the apocalypse, I give you my best guess in chapter 1.

As I write this companion guide, people are rebelling in half a dozen nations against repressive governments. The world is receiving daily news about these events, and other countries are expressing diplomatic concerns and otherwise trying to ease tensions and help the citizens cope. As I write this chapter, Japan has just experienced an estimated 8.9-magnitude earthquake and tsunami with nuclear reactor repercussions, and current news reports fear that 10,000 people have already died. The world is reaching out to help the Japanese people.

It’s true that governments do not always lend sufficient support when major catastrophes occur (Stalin and other dictators slaughtering their own people, hurricanes such as Katrina, and so forth). But the world knows about such suffering, and support is
usually
available at least to
some
extent.

So where is everybody and everything? I give you my best guess about this issue in chapter 1, as well: that maybe the survivors in other parts of the world are too busy coping with their own issues, that maybe communications systems have been mangled.

Only Suzanne Collins—and possibly her editor and agent—knows the background of the Hunger Games apocalypse.

Post-apocalyptic fiction has been around for a long time (see Appendix B for examples). So has apocalyptic fiction, which takes the reader
through
the end-of- the-world scenarios. A typical example of apocalyptic fiction is Stephen King’s 1978 novel,
The Stand,
in which a worldwide plague wipes out most of the human race. But King’s novel is also a post-apocalyptic work because it traces not only the plague, but what happens after the plague kills everyone.

This is a common technique used by writers: show us the apocalyptic event as well as the post-apocalypse aftermath. Richard Matheson, who served as one of King’s strongest literary influences, composed a frightening novel of biological warfare in the near future in 1954’s I Am Legend. In the story, a deadly artificial plague infects mankind and there is no cure. Only a few humans are immune to the disease that turns the rest of the population into vampires who feed on blood. Matheson’s description of the breakdown of civilization was amplified by King to great effect in The Stand a quarter of a century later.

The atomic bomb was the weapon of choice in novels of humanity’s destruction in the 1960s and 1970s. Biological weapons seemed very hit or miss when compared with the total devastation brought about by an atomic bomb. Plus, zombies created by atomic radiation were all the rage. As I write this book, zombie fiction has been making a huge comeback.

But clearly, the depressing future portrayed in The Hunger Games series does not involve zombies. Nor has a killer comet struck Panem, as far as we know. The Capitol didn’t beat down the masses because an asteroid smashed into North America, as far as we know. There were no supermassive black holes or volcanic eruptions that we know of. District 12 wasn’t hit by bizarre gamma rays from outer space. Vampires don’t roam the earth.

It is not within the scope of this book to describe all of these apocalyptic scenarios in great detail: