Day in the Life of an Idiot

I finished MOCKINGJAY, the last book in the HUNGER GAMES trilogy by Suzanne Collins, at about ten p.m. last night. I set the book down, turned off the lights, crawled into bed and hugged Shawn really tightly.

I laid there for a long, long time feeling awful.

If you don't know anything about this trilogy (...I'm surprised, because it's all over the NY Times bestselling list, even Entertainment Weekly has already put up votes for their dream cast for the eventual movie, but you might be like me and be about ten years behind any current trend, so...), the basic story at the start is about a fifteen year old girl, Katniss Everdeen, who lives in a future America where every year a kind of ultimate reality show is hosted in the Capitol, called "The Hunger Games." Children from each of the twelve districts (excuding the Capitol) are chosen to fight to the death as a kind of grisy bread-and-circuses, but with a political twist, as the twelve districts all took part in a revolution against the Capitol.

This kind of story has been kicking around science fiction since at least "The Running Man," if not before. But that doesn't diminish the power of Collins's take on it, IMHO, because what she does is give us an unblinking, relentless portrayal of the horrors of war and the effect violence has on individuals and communities.

That's a really worthy story. There is no violent act in this book that doesn't irreversibly change... well, everything. Katniss is, in point of fact, broken by the end. Completely. The "bad" guys might have been defeated, but she will ALWAYS live with her demons (and her equally broken partner,) the end. Damn.

I got to the end (which I describe under the cut above to avoid spoilage, as MOCKINGJAY is brand, spanking new), and I realized that I could NEVER write a story like this. My own personal experience with loss is too raw, too painful. Collins never specifically touches on the experience I had, but she clearly gets how losing someone unexpectedly affects a person... and so the ending is just a bit TOO real for me.

And that was a surprising response that I suspect I'll be thinking about for years to come. Science fiction often gets a bad rap because we deal in things that aren't real (or, more accurately, things that are possible, but haven't happened yet and may never happen, but could.) Our films get mocked because we tend towards epic battles with bright explosions. And, maybe we aren't taken seriously sometimes because our genre tends to be optimistic -- hopeful, even.

And that's not terribly realistic.

Eleanor and I were talking about this a couple of weeks ago at our usual coffee/writing get together and she said she remembered a quote about science fiction that she thought was attributed to Asimov, but she wasn't sure. Anyway, she paraphrased it like this: science fiction is ultimately optimistic because it shows that there WILL be a future and it WILL be different.

I think even at our most dystopian, like cyberpunk, we might show a world as dark and brutal, but our hero/ines triumph in a satisfying, hopeful way.

Frankly, given what sh*t real life is, I need that.

MOCKINGJAY didn't pull any punches, and, honestly, I'm glad it didn't. I think the series is an awesome and worthy addition to our genre, but, for me, reading it... hurt. And I don't want to do that again for a while.