Moving on--and struggling to start this without just pasting from something I wrote elsewhere--I gave up and decided to do the paste thing.
Art in the Age After Mechanical Reproduction
Hunger Games is told in the first-person present tense. So? Well, first-person present is NOT a document, as in the epistolary novel. It's also not a transcription of a spoken narrative. It seems, to this reader, to be something like a live feed from just slightly below the top of Katniss' thought processes, cleaned-up and put into complete sentences and "footnotes" for our edification. (I like the idea of actually reifying this concept in a sci-fi work, but lack the plot to go with it.)
This gives it a few advantages in surmounting some traditional sci-fi stumbling blocks. (there's a relevant humor piece I currently can't load. You've probably read it.) Katniss can brush us up on history, when it's useful to us, because it connects to her current circumstances, leading her to remember it. Technological issues avoid getting bogged down in nitpicking because Katniss doesn't "know" which technologies are fictional from the audience's perspective, and which are perfectly normal. (It also allows the possibility of the protagonist's death without giving us the comforting distance of third-person narration, but that's neither here nor there.)
Panem's tech tree is, to say the least, rather staggered. District 12 seems to be in a comfortably 19th-century lifestyle, aside from the widespread electric fencing and televisions. This is not entirely out of sync with our own experiences in the really real world; North Korea (one of the more obvious world-building influences) has a ubiquity of TVs and radios, even in areas with only haphazard electricity. Other districts, we alternately assume and are told, are a bit more high-tech. The electronics district presumably requires a pretty high threshold to produce all the shit we see in the Capitol, assuming those things are, in fact, being produced. Even the jewelry might fall under this category, judging by the amount of bio-mod fashion we see in the Capitol. At any rate, there seems to be an uneven distribution of both resources and infrastructure across the districts, based on need, resources, and politics.
Which is a long way of saying that we don't have any idea how wealthy the Capitol actually is. This is by design. A defining feature of unstable dictatorships is the extravagant display of wealth and power, to convince anyone who's looking that there's more where that came from. Very often, there isn't. It's very expensive to look richer than you are. (Useful dictum: if you're weak and want to deter conflict, look strong. If you're strong and want to kill people, look weak.) The year-long spectacle of the Games, expensive though it may be, might well be cheaper than actually improving the quality of life in the Districts without forcing the Capitol citizens to undergo the kind of minor inconveniences that lead first-worlders to riot and kill each other.
In BSG, there's significant dramatic tension whenever a pilot is lost. It's felt at all levels of command, not only because the pilot is a human being who can't be replaced--well, that's not entirely accurate. The human being can't be replaced, but "pilot" is a job, and it can certainly be filled by someone else. Training will be a lot harder with only .00001% of the population to work with, but it's not as insurmountable a barrier as the fact that the ships can't be replaced. It's a fleet, not a civilization. Almost everything is irreplaceable without a planet to live on.
Panem has a planet to live on, but much of it seems to have been rendered unusable. We don't know who survived the cataclysms, or why, but it's reasonable to assume that a lot of the tech on display has not been invented but scavenged. The Capitol's engineers might not know how to replace some of this stuff.
Even if they do--for example, if they've reverse-engineered it from salvaged tech--unless they authored the technology in question, they're in a rather symbolic situation. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn writes that a paradigm determines not only what is known, but what questions it's sensible to ask. Consequently, when scientists find themselves grappling with problems from other fields, the results can be unpredictable.
Assuming there was a significant loss in the technical knowledge of the survivors, even if they've learned to replicate "lost" technologies, they aren't familiar with the scientific paradigm that allowed for their development. They aren't asking the same questions as those who discovered these technologies. So, technology ends up being repurposed. Almost every fantastic technology on display in the Capitol is related, in some way, to a) force fields, b) VTOL flight, c) genetic engineering.
A and B might, in fact, proceed from a common technology, developed from ideas and inventions that were supposed to die, but survived and reproduced. The Capitol skies are full of mockingjays.
The genetic engineering points back to a trickier issue, one that gets at the ultimate function of the Games. The tracker jackers and jabberjays are military devices from the last war. (For any LaRouche supporters who might feel a monologue coming on, a quick mention of other notable military technologies: the internet, the interstate highway, the horse.) The werewolf muttations from the 74th games, and the snake-people from the 76th, deserve a closer look.
The werewolves threw a lot of readers. They feel out of place with the rest of the book. I suspect they're supposed to. Given that they're still using good old-fashioned humans for policework, muttations must have some drawbacks that disqualify them for wider work.
Consider the circumstances in which we meet them: strategic deployment in established combat zones for short-term use. It's likely the newer muttations don't live too long; it's likely there's a high failure rate in their (very expensive) development process. But they do what they're designed for well, and it's not, strictly speaking, killing people. The Capitol has LOTS of ways to kill people. The muttations are designed to break opponents' spirits by scaring the living fuck out of them.
So the question is not, is it plausible to us that the Capitol made wolf-men from the corpses of the fallen tributes? But rather, can the Capitol make a semi-bipedal animal that carries enough iconography that a severely traumatized teenager, half-out of her mind with terror and hate, might see fallen tributes when she looks at it. Similarly, it's not an accident that the snakemen can pronounce exactly one word, "Katniss." These aren't soldiers, but weapons, designed with a narrow focus, as most advanced weapons tech is. We developed microwave guns to disrupt enemy electronics, specifically surveillance and anti-aircraft devices. So it's a good thing we're going to spend the near future fighting people using low-tech weaponry salvaged during the 1970s.
Which brings us back the Games, which are more than a show of power, more than bread and circuses, and more than a way to prevent solidarity between districts. It's also the only effective way to test experimental weaponry without an outside opponent with whom to engage in warfare. The arena is a lab. And for that reason, among others, the darkest element of the series' bittersweet ending might not be that Prim dies, but that Plutarch Heavensbee survives. Like the grinning MC from Cabaret, there's something more and less than human about him, and whoever holds power, he'll survive.
Which brings us to politics, up next, including a bit that wandered into this post, got me depressed, and delayed its posting by a month or so.