![]() ![]() ![]() The Hunger Games are all about bread and circuses. It tells us how and why they came to be in the first place. And it fulfills that function capably enough, although it fails to ever quite reach the adrenaline-pumping urgency of the first trilogy.īut more pressingly, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is an origin story for the Hunger Games themselves. The new book is billed as an origin story for Coriolanus Snow, the future president of Panem and the chief villain of the original trilogy. ![]() This week sees the publication of Suzanne Collins’s The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, a prequel to her wildly successful Hunger Games trilogy about a dystopian world in which children are forced to battle to the death on reality TV. The latest fictional dystopia is also an old one. Pop culture is America’s subconscious, and ours has been dreaming apocalyptic dreams. In a way, it’s as though we’ve been preparing for this eventuality for decades. ![]() As our present moment grows to feel more and more apocalyptic - pandemics, climate change, murder hornets, plants that cause third-degree burns and also blindness - it can be oddly comforting to escape to a fictional dystopia. ![]()
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