The Girl Who Was on Fire (14 page)

At each point, Katniss and the rebels are acutely aware of how their narrative will inspire the rebellion and how to take advantage of this fact. Cressida edits together moments from the Hunger Games and from Katniss’ life as a series of propos designed to garner sympathy and loyalty for the Mockingjay, while Fulvia creates a series of
We Remember
propos about tributes lost to the brutality of the Capitol in previous Games. The Capitol engages in similar propaganda, having Peeta, once a symbol of the rebellion next to Katniss, publicly beg for a ceasefire in an attempt to temper the resistance. Both the rebels and the Capitol are engaged in a battle not just of soldiers but of narratives: editing moments together to elicit the desired response from viewers.

All of this culminates in the most dramatic and monstrous event in the book: the bombing of the children in front of the president’s mansion in the Capitol’s City Circle. It doesn’t matter what the reality is behind the bombing, who conceived of it or ordered it, only how it is edited to shape the mindset of the people to finally end the war in favor of the rebels. And because this narrative fits into what we know of the Capitol already—that it is brutal and willing to kill twenty-three of its own children in the Hunger Games each year—we are willing
to accept this atrocity as truth, regardless of who precipitated it. What matters is that the action is presented as truth and feels like truth. For many people, that’s enough.

In his short story
How to Tell a True War Story
, Tim O’Brien writes that “a thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.” Sometimes a lie can get to the heart of a matter better than the truth, and sometimes a strict retelling of the truth cannot adequately capture reality. In this way, a trilogy like The Hunger Games, though it is fiction, can get to the truth of our obsession not just with Reality TV but with our willingness to abdicate our own responsibility in the face of what we’re told is real.

Put simply: reality can be a lie. Narrators, producers, and editors can all manipulate those snippets of reality we watch, which can twist our perception of it in order to induce us to want more. And of course, if there’s one thing we feel we can take as truth in these books it’s Katniss and her narrative. But we should ask ourselves whether even this should be above suspicion. Like all first-person narrators, Katniss is her own editor with her own biases: she chooses how to present herself and those around her. Katniss has a stake in the story she’s telling and what that stake is changes how she portrays the events and her emotional reaction to them.

Too often we accept what is labeled “reality” as truth rather than trying to understand what narrative the source might be promoting (whether that narrative is a quest for ratings or an attempt to promote a desired outcome). The Hunger Games trilogy demonstrates how an entire nation can be spurred into a
rebellion through the use of propaganda and cleverly crafted narrative presented as reality. It shows how a culture’s obsession with the dramatic, even if it is false, can lead to a complete abdication of personal responsibility in exchange for continued entertainment. We are responsible, as citizens, to look beyond
bread and circuses
and not to accept information as it is handed to us but to search for a deeper truth.

We can rail against the dominance of Reality TV shows, but so long as viewers continue to watch them, advertisers will continue to sponsor them and they’ll keep being produced. This is the true nature of the industry. In the end, if there is one truth that can be taken away from the Hunger Games it is this: we, the reader, tuned in and boosted its rating. Even while Katniss rails against the Games as disgusting and barbaric, we the readers turn the pages in order to watch them. We become the citizens in the Capitol, glued to the television, ensuring there will be another Game the following year. Thanks to us, the ratings are just too high to cancel the show.

CARRIE RYAN
is the
New York Times
bestselling author of several critically acclaimed novels, including
The Forest of Hands and Teeth
,
The Dead Tossed Waves
, and
The Dark and Hollow Places
. Her first novel was chosen as a Best Books for Young Adults by the American Library Association, named to the 2010 New York Public Library Stuff for the Teen Age List, and selected as a Best of the Best Books by the Chicago Public Library. A former litigator, Carrie now writes full-time and lives with her husband, two fat cats, and one large dog in Charlotte, North Carolina. You can find her online at
www.carrieryan.com
.

 

 

Part of the pleasure of reading the Hunger Games is how alien its world is: the names, the food, the way people live. However dark the story becomes, reading about Panem is always laced with the excitement of discovery. Even mutts, some of Suzanne Collins’ scariest creations, seem thrilling just because they’re so strange. But as with all the best science fiction, Katniss’ world has more in common with ours than we might initially think. Real-world scientists aren’t far from being able to create mutts of their own. Here, Cara Lockwood explores genetic splicing, the dangers of technology in both worlds, and the responsibility that comes with creation.

 

 

I
will admit right now that I am entirely too critical of most sci-fi. I’m the one sitting in the movie theater grumbling, “that could never happen.” Or, more concisely, I’ll just say: “Seriously?”

Could there be some crazy disease somewhere in a lab that would turn the entire planet into brain-eating zombies or sunlight-fearing vampires? No way. Beefing up shark brains to make them super-smart predators? I don’t think so. Crazed prehistoric-sized piranhas that will devour anybody with an inflatable floatie and a cooler? Please. They want us to believe this stuff?

Like take the insane DNA-spliced mutant monsters that make terrifying cameos throughout the Hunger Games. I’m supposed to believe that one day we could be ripped apart by mutant wolves with tribute eyes? Stung by poisonous and relentless tracker jackers? Or get devoured by giant lizard men?

Seriously?

As it turns out ... maybe so.

Not only do muttations—“mutts” for short—already exist in our world, but the stuff real scientists are doing is far wackier and sometimes scarier than what we see in the Hunger Games—if you can imagine that.

In this essay, you’ll read about some of the movie-worthy stuff going on in labs right now that makes jabberjays seem quaint. We’ll talk about why real-life sci-fi is way scarier than anything you might find in the Hunger Games, and about the lesson we can learn from Panem about not playing God and using science wisely.

But first: let’s talk about the science that makes mutts possible: genetic engineering.

In the real world, genetic engineering—the science of altering DNA by adding or subtracting genes in order to create a different kind of creature, or in some cases the science of cloning an existing one—isn’t new. In 1997, scientists in the United Kingdom reproduced the first genetically cloned sheep, named Polly. The first incarnation of Polly was simply a duplication of a sheep’s embryo—a clone—implanted into a different sheep and brought to term like a normal sheep.

You may have heard of Polly, but did you know that another sheep was actually genetically engineered with some human genes fused into the DNA of the sheep? CNN reported the news in 1997 shortly after Polly was born and before many countries passed laws banning experiments using human DNA. So, yes, technically, we’ve already had a human-sheep hybrid. Of course, we aren’t talking about an unusually furry guy named Bob who can produce the wool to make his own argyle sweaters. While a human-sheep hybrid
sounds
pretty creepy, these post-Polly hybrids looked like sheep; they only had a few human genes among tens of thousands.

And we didn’t stop with sheep.

In 2001, American scientists genetically spliced a jellyfish gene into a moth, making a new moth designed to kill the pink bollworm—a pest that destroys cotton crops. Jellyfish and moths? It sounds exactly like something you’d find in the Games.

But genetic engineering gets weirder.

Scientists have been working on genetically engineering silkworms that could spin silk strong enough to repel bullets by splicing silkworms and spiders. By weight, spider-silk could be stronger than steel and tougher than man-made fibers used in a soldier’s body armor.

Gene splicing is pretty much what it sounds like. You cut into the DNA of a gene to add some new stuff—except you don’t use a knife. You use chemicals—certain enzymes that will “cut” into the DNA strand. Then scientists add in new DNA and glue it all back together with another enzyme. Since DNA is what makes a cell a cell and determines its function, the splice in DNA causes changes—like the production of extra-strong spider silk or pink bollworm poison. And, there you have it, the beginning of our very own mutts

One day we could even be eating nothing but mutts.

The New Scientist
in July reported that scientists have already engineered pigs with omega-3 fatty acids. So forget bacon and eggs—you might be able to get all your nutrients straight from the bacon. They’re also working on cows immune to BSE, or mad-cow disease, and a host of other engineered animals, including faster-growing salmon that could be on our dinner tables faster than you can swim upstream. And unless you live in Europe, where there are stricter laws governing genetically engineered foods, nearly every kind of vegetable or grain you eat is already genetically engineered.
¹⁶
From tomatoes that stay ripe longer to green peppers and zucchini that are resistant to viruses and pests to rice that contains more Vitamin A, most of our crops are genetically engineered in some way.

So, we’re working on some seriously crazy stuff. Some possible super dystopian sci-fi Panem stuff. (I might have to stop saying “seriously?” at the movies and start taking the possibility of a shark/squid hybrid or a time-traveling hot tub, actually, well—seriously.)

At first glance, it certainly seems like there’s a big difference between our genetic engineering and Panem’s. Mutts are dreamt up in Capitol labs and designed to wreck havoc on the tributes at the Games, plus pretty much anybody daring to stand up to President Snow or his regime.

They’re terrifying. They’re unnatural. They’re bloodthirsty and murderous. They attack without warning, and they don’t stop until their victim is dead. They devour, slash, and rip apart the living. In the sewers in the Capitol, Katniss Everdeen flees a lizard mutant:

These aren’t just predators, they’re actually
driven mad
by the need to kill. They work themselves into a frenzy, like sharks when there’s blood in the water, except that even sharks eventually stop killing. Mutts never do—no matter how much they eat.

“No mutt is good,” Katniss says in
Mockingjay
. And let’s face it. Science can be scary. It’s no accident that the mad scientist is
an enduring villain who creeps up at every Halloween party. Mad, ego-driven, over-confident scientists have been the bad guys in everything from Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
to the crazy gene-splicing madman in
The Island of Dr. Moreau
and the wellmeaning but over-reaching scientist couple in
Splice
. The idea that science can lead to the unnatural creation of monsters isn’t new to the Hunger Games, and it’s easy to take that to mean science is, well, evil.

Let’s look at what else Katniss says in
Mockingjay
about mutts:

The killer mutts are terrifying, but it’s not because of science. The Gamemakers and the scientists designed them to scare the stuffing out of you. That’s why they are such effective weapons. It’s not just that they’re unnatural; it’s that they’re created specifically to get inside your head and stay there. If mutts are bad, it’s not because science is bad. It’s because the people who created them are.