LBS 4890 - Researching & Writing the Senior Project

Disc 1. The final cut (2007) -- disc 2. Dangerous days : making Blade Runner (214 min.) / Jerry Perenchio, Bud Yorkin and Warner Home Video present ; a Lauzirika production -- disc 3. U.S. theatrical cut (1982) ; International theatrical cut (1982) ; Director's cut (1992) -- disc 4. Enhancement archive.
Los Angeles, 2019: Rick Deckard of the LAPD's Blade Runner unit prowls the steel & microchip jungle of the 21st century. His job is to track down and eliminate assumed humanoids known as 'replicants.' Replicants were declared illegal after a bloody mutiny on an Off-World Colony, and are to be terminated upon detection. He wants to get out of the force, but is drawn back in when 6 "skin jobs," the slang for replicants, hijack a ship back to Earth. The city that Deckard must search for his prey is a huge, sprawling, bleak vision of the future

Disc 1: The movie: All-new, restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Terry Gilliam, with a remastered Dolby stereo. surround soundtrack; Audio commentary by Gilliam (142 min) -- Disc 2: The production notebook: "What is 'Brazil'?", Rob Hedden's 30-minute on-set documentary; "The battle of 'Brazil': a video history", an original 60-minute Criterion documentary by Jack Mathews; Screenwriters Tom Stoppard and Charles McKeown on the script; Production designer Norman Garwood on the look of 'Brazil'; Costume designer James Acheson on the couture of fantasy and fascism; Storyboards for Gilliam's original dream sequences, many of which didn't make it into the film; Composer Michael Kamen unveils the sources of his score; A study of the special effects, including raw footage of unfinished effects; Theatrical trailer; Publicity and production stills (86 min.) -- Disc 3: 'Brazil': the "Love conquers all" version: The 94-minute cut of 'Brazil', which includes all the changes that Gilliam refused to make, from the alternate opening to the controversial happy ending; Audio commentary by Gilliam expert David Morgan; An essay by Jack Mathews

Theo Faron is a bureaucrat in a Britain gone despotic. It is 2027 and the entire planet has gone infertile. Women no longer have babies, and chaos has erupted: war, rebellion, mass destruction, and a huge refugee problem, with the imposition of martial law. One day, Theo is kidnapped. His ex-wife Julian has a proposition for her former spouse, and because of their relationship, she thinks Theo will acquiesce. Theo is about to be tossed into a web of intrigue involving the very fate of humanity.

Set in the near future, the handmaids of the title are women who can still bear children after the ravages of war caused wide-spread sterility. One of the handmaids, Kate, is caught trying to escape the Republic of Gilead and sent to the prison-like training center. She is sent from there to the home of the commander to bear his child, but revolutionary forces have other plans for her!

In the desolate near future, road cop Mad Max tires of chasing after vicious roving gangs and quits. When his wife and child are murdered by a motorcycle gang he returns to seek revenge.

Contains the three feature films, The matrix, The matrix reloaded, and The matrix revolutions, along with over 35 hours of background materials and works inspired by the films.

The story of a 21st century city run by a "super trustee" and his collaborators who live in a paradise-like garden. Workers are totally enslaved by machines and condemned to live underground. In the midst of this misery, a young woman, Maria, arises and attempts to inspire the workers to throw off their oppressors.

The near future. Like tomorrow. In a world marked by closed borders, corporate warriors, and a global computer network, three strangers risk their lives to connect, break through the barriers of technology, and unseal their fates.

Charlton Heston plays a cop in this science-fiction horror story. The setting is New York in the year 2022, teeming with 40 million citizens, most of whom are out of work. Environmental erosion is almost complete and voluntary death is encouraged by government-sponsored clinics. For their food, the people have grown to rely on a wafer-like substance called soylent. As Heston investigates the murder of a magnate in the dictatorial Soylent Company, he comes face to face with the hideous truth about the secret ingredient of "Soylent Green."

"A fantasy of the future that sheds a blazing critical light on the present--considered to be Aldous Huxley's most enduring masterpiece. Mr. Huxley is eloquent in his declaration of an artist's faith in man, and it is his eloquence, bitter in attack, noble in defense, that, when one has closed the book, one remembers. A Fantastic racy narrative, full of much excellent satire and literary horseplay. It is as sparkling, provocative, as brilliant, in the appropriate sense, as impressive as the day it was published. This is in part because its prophetic voice has remained surprisingly contemporary, both in its particular forecasts and in its general tone of semiserious alarm.

In Anthony Burgess's influential nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, a teen who talks in a fantastically inventive slang that evocatively renders his and his friends' intense reaction against their society. Dazzling and transgressive, A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil and the meaning of human freedom. This edition includes the controversial last chapter not published in the first edition, and Burgess's introduction, "A Clockwork Orange Resucked."

The hauntingly prophetic classic novel set in a not-too-distant future where books are burned by a special task force of firemen. Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn books, which are forbidden, being the source of all discord and unhappiness. Even so, Montag is unhappy; there is discord in his marriage. Are books hidden in his house? The Mechanical Hound of the Fire Department, armed with a lethal hypodermic, escorted by helicopters, is ready to track down those dissidents who defy society to preserve and read books. The classic novel of a post-literate future, Fahrenheit 451 stands alongside Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World as a prophetic account of Western civilization's enslavement by the media, drugs and conformity.

The Handmaid's Tale is not only a radical and brilliant departure for Margaret Atwood, it is a novel of such power that the reader will be unable to forget its images and its forecast. Set in the near future, it describes life in what was once the United States, now called the Republic of Gilead, a monotheocracy that has reacted to social unrest and a sharply declining birthrate by reverting to, and going beyond, the repressive intolerance of the original Puritans. The regime takes the Book of Genesis absolutely at its world, with bizarre consequences for the women and men of its population. The story is told through the eyes of Offred, one of the unfortunate Handmaids under the new social order. In condensed but eloquent prose, by turns cool-eyed, tender, despairing, passionate, and wry, she reveals to us the dark corners behind the establishment's calm façade, as certain tendencies now in existence are carried to their logical conclusions.

Portrays a terrifying vision of life in the future when a totalitarian government, considered a "Negative Utopia," watches over all citizens and directs all activities, becoming more powerful as time goes by.

"Dystopian narrative is a product of the social ferment of the twentieth century. A hundred years of war, famine, disease, state terror, genocide, ecocide, and the depletion of humanity through the buying and selling of everyday life provided fertile ground for this fictive underside of the utopian imagination. From the classical works by E.M. Forster, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Margaret Atwood, through the new maps of hell in postwar science fiction, and most recently in the dystopian turn of the 1980s and 1990s, this narrative machine has produced challenging cognitive maps of the given historical situation by way of imaginary societies which are even worse than those that lie outside their authors' and readers' doors. In Scraps of the Untainted Sky, Tom Moylan offers a thorough investigation of the history and aesthetics of dystopia. To situate his study, Moylan sets out the methodological paradigm that developed within the interdisciplinary fields of science fiction studies and utopian studies as they grow out of the oppositional political culture of the 1960 and 1970s (the context that produced the project of cultural studies itself). He then presents a thorough account of the textual structure and formal operations of the dystopian text. From there, he focuses on the new science-fictional dystopias that emerged in the context of the economic, political, and cultural convulsions of the 1980s and 1990s, and he examines in detail three of these new "critical dystopias:" Kim Stanley Robinson's The Gold Coast, Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower, and Marge Piercy's He, She, and It .

Authoritarianism is on the march-and so is dystopian fiction. In the brave new twenty-first century, young-adult series likeThe Hunger Games and Divergent have become blockbusters; after Donald Trump's election, two dystopian classics,1984 and The Handmaid's Tale, skyrocketed to the New York Times best-seller list. This should come as no surprise: dystopian fiction has a lot to say about the perils of terrible government in real life. In Survive and Resist, Amy L. Atchison and Shauna L. Shames explore the ways in which dystopian narratives help explain how real-world politics work. They draw on classic and contemporary fiction, films, and TV shows-as well as their real-life counterparts-to offer funny and accessible explanations of key political concepts. Atchison and Shames demonstrate that dystopias both real and imagined help bring theories of governance, citizenship, and the state down to earth.

Women's Utopian and Dystopian Fiction explores the genres of utopian and dystopian recent fiction. It is about how this literature of both imagined perfection and disaster creates new worlds and critiques gender roles, traditions, and values. Essays range in subject matter from Charlotte Perkins Gilman, P. D. James, Joanna Russ, and Marge Piercy, to Ursula Le Guin, Fay Weldon, and Toni Morrison. Two of the three sections focus on Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood.

Introduction : utopia and black American thought -- Martin Delany's experiment in escape -- Turn-of-the-century black literary utopianism -- W.E.B. Du Bois's world of utopian intimacy -- George S. Schuyler, irony, and utopia -- Richard Wright's black power and anticolonial antiutopianism -- Sun Ra and cosmic blackness -- Samuel Delany and the ambiguity of utopia -- Octavia Butler and the politics of utopian transcendence -- Conclusion : black utopia and the contemporary political imagination

ntroduction: the whiteness of science fiction and the speculative fiction of blackness -- Josh Brandon's blues: inventing the black fan -- Space race woman: Lieutenant Uhura beyond the bridge -- The immortal storm: permutations of race in Marvel comics -- Controversy and crossover in milestone media's icon -- The golden ghetto and the glittering parentheses: the once and future Benjamin Sisko -- Dreaming in color: racial revisions in fan fiction -- Coda.

In Speculative Blackness, André M. Carrington analyzes the highly racialized genre of speculative fiction--including science fiction, fantasy, and utopian works, along with their fan cultures--to illustrate the relationship between genre conventions in media and the meanings ascribed to blackness in the popular imagination. Carrington's argument about authorship, fandom, and race in a genre that has been both marginalized and celebrated offers a black perspective on iconic works of science fiction. He examines the career of actor Nichelle Nichols, who portrayed the character Uhura in the original Star Trek television series and later became a recruiter for NASA, and the spin-off series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, set on a space station commanded by a black captain. He recovers a pivotal but overlooked moment in 1950s science fiction fandom in which readers and writers of fanzines confronted issues of race by dealing with a fictitious black fan writer and questioning the relevance of race to his ostensible contributions to the 'zines. Carrington mines the productions of Marvel comics and the black-owned comics publisher Milestone Media, particularly the representations of black sexuality in its flagship title, Icon. He also interrogates online fan fiction about black British women in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Harry Potter series. Throughout this nuanced analysis, Carrington theorizes the relationship between race and genre in cultural production, revealing new understandings of the significance of blackness in twentieth-century American literature and culture.

Introduction: Race Theory and Hemispheric Juxtaposition -- Part I. Ambas Américas -- 1. "A Black Sister to Massachusetts" : Latin America and the Fugitive Democratic Ethos of Frederick Douglass -- 2. "Mi Patria de Pensamiento" : Sarmiento, the United States, and the Pitfalls of Comparison -- Part II. Mestizo Futurologies -- 3. "To See, Foresee, and Prophesy" : Du Bois' Mulatto Fictions and Afro-Futurism -- 4. "A Doctrine that Nourished the Hopes of the Non-White Races" : Vasconcelos, Mestizaje's Travels, and U.S. Latino Politics.

Human Contradictions in Octavia Butler’s Work continues the critical discussions of Butler’s work by offering a variety of theoretical perspectives and approaches to Butler’s text. This collection contains original essays that engage Butler’s series (Seed to Harvest, Xenogenesis, Parables), her stand-alone novels (Kindred and Fledgling), and her short stories. The essays explore new facets of Butler’s work and its relevance to philosophy, sociology, anthropology, psychology, cultural studies, ethnic studies, women’s studies, religious studies, American studies, and U.S. history. The volume establishes new ways of reading this seminal figure in African American literature, science fiction, feminism, and popular culture.

Locus Award Winner--Best First Novel A National Indie Bestseller Nebula Award Finalist Lodestar Award Finalist Ignyte Award Finalist TIME's Best 100 Fantasy Books of All Time NPR Best of the Year Booklist's Top 10 First Novels for Youth A BookPage Best of the Year Chicago Public Library "Best of the Best" PNBA Bestseller Publishers Weekly Best of the Year Buzzfeed's Best YA SFF of the Year Shelf-Awareness Best of the Year AICL Best YA of the Year NECBA Windows & Mirrors Selection NEIBA Award Finalist Tor Best of the Year Kirkus Best YA of the Year Publishers Weekly Flying Start American Indian Youth Literature Award Finalist "Groundbreaking."--TIME "Deeply enjoyable from start to finish."--NPR "Utterly magical."--SyFyWire "Atmospheric and lyrical...a gorgeous work of art."--BuzzFeed "One of the best YA debuts of 2020. Read it."--Marieke Nijkamp ★ "A fresh voice and perspective."--Booklist, starred review ★ "A unique and powerful Native American voice."--BookPage, starred review ★ "A brilliant, engaging debut."--Kirkus Reviews, starred review ★ "A fast-paced murder mystery."--Publishers Weekly, starred review ★ "A Lipan Apache Sookie Stackhouse for the teen set."--Shelf-Awareness, starred review A Texas teen comes face-to-face with a cousin's ghost and vows to unmask the murderer. Elatsoe--Ellie for short--lives in an alternate contemporary America shaped by the ancestral magics and knowledge of its Indigenous and immigrant groups. She can raise the spirits of dead animals--most importantly, her ghost dog Kirby. When her beloved cousin dies, all signs point to a car crash, but his ghost tells her otherwise: He was murdered. Who killed him and how did he die? With the help of her family, her best friend Jay, and the memory great, great, great, great, great, great grandmother, Elatsoe, must track down the killer and unravel the mystery of this creepy town and it's dark past. But will the nefarious townsfolk and a mysterious Doctor stop her before she gets started? A breathtaking debut novel featuring an asexual, Apache teen protagonist, Elatsoe combines mystery, horror, noir, ancestral knowledge, haunting illustrations, fantasy elements, and is one of the most-talked about debuts of the year.

A New York Times Notable Book Louise Erdrich, the New York Times bestselling, National Book Award-winning author of LaRose and The Round House, paints a startling portrait of a young woman fighting for her life and her unborn child against oppressive forces that manifest in the wake of a cataclysmic event. The world as we know it is ending. Evolution has reversed itself, affecting every living creature on earth. Science cannot stop the world from running backwards, as woman after woman gives birth to infants that appear to be primitive species of humans. Twenty-six-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker, adopted daughter of a pair of big-hearted, open-minded Minneapolis liberals, is as disturbed and uncertain as the rest of America around her. But for Cedar, this change is profound and deeply personal. She is four months pregnant. Though she wants to tell the adoptive parents who raised her from infancy, Cedar first feels compelled to find her birth mother, Mary Potts, an Ojibwe living on the reservation, to understand both her and her baby's origins. As Cedar goes back to her own biological beginnings, society around her begins to disintegrate, fueled by a swelling panic about the end of humanity. There are rumors of martial law, of Congress confining pregnant women. Of a registry, and rewards for those who turn these wanted women in. Flickering through the chaos are signs of increasing repression: a shaken Cedar witnesses a family wrenched apart when police violently drag a mother from her husband and child in a parking lot. The streets of her neighborhood have been renamed with Bible verses. A stranger answers the phone when she calls her adoptive parents, who have vanished without a trace. It will take all Cedar has to avoid the prying eyes of potential informants and keep her baby safe. A chilling dystopian novel both provocative and prescient, Future Home of the Living God is a startlingly original work from one of our most acclaimed writers: a moving meditation on female agency, self-determination, biology, and natural rights that speaks to the troubling changes of our time.

Set more than 300 years ago and following the Comanche Nation, Prey tells the story of a uniquely skilled warrior called Naru. When an advanced alien threat emerges, she must do whatever it takes to protect her tribe.

Prey takes place within the Predator franchise and serves as a prequel to the classic 1987 action sci-fi film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Comanche are a Native American tribe from the Southern Plains of present-day United States. They are also known as Lords of the Plains.

Newbery Honor Winner National Indie Bestseller National Book Award Longlist Minneapolis Star Tribune Best of the Year Publishers Weekly Best of the Year Kirkus Best the Year Apple Best of the Year Chicago Public Library's Best of the Best New York Public Library's Best of the Year Autostraddle's Best Queer Books of the Year "A spellbinding tale."--Texas Monthly "Genre-bending."--TIME "Undeniably charming."--Tor.com ★ "Evokes the timeless feeling of listening to traditional oral storytelling."--Kirkus (starred) ★ "Fun, imaginative, and deeply immersive, this story will be long in the minds of readers."--Publishers Weekly (starred) ★ "Magical, stunning, and wholly original."--Booklist (starred) "A highly descriptive story which absorbs the audience into its world, readers will become invested in reading until the very end."--School Library Connection A Snake Falls to Earth is a breathtaking work of Indigenous futurism. Darcie Little Badger draws on traditional Lipan Apache storytelling structure to weave another unforgettable tale of monsters, magic, and family. It is not to be missed. Nina is a Lipan girl in our world. She's always felt there was something more out there. She still believes in the old stories. Oli is a cottonmouth kid, from the land of spirits and monsters. Like all cottonmouths, he's been cast from home. He's found a new one on the banks of the bottomless lake. Nina and Oli have no idea the other exists. But a catastrophic event on Earth, and a strange sickness that befalls Oli's best friend, will drive their worlds together in ways they haven't been in centuries. And there are some who will kill to keep them apart.

powerful and fiercely personal journey through a compelling postapocalyptic landscape." --Kate Elliott, New York Times bestselling author of Court of Fives and Black Wolves While most of the world has drowned beneath the sudden rising waters of a climate apocalypse, Dinétah (formerly the Navajo reservation) has been reborn. The gods and heroes of legend walk the land, but so do monsters--and it is up to one young woman to unravel the mysteries of the past before they destroy the future. Maggie Hoskie is a Dinétah monster hunter, a supernaturally gifted killer. When a small town needs help finding a missing girl, Maggie is their last best hope. But what Maggie uncovers about the monster is much more terrifying than anything she could imagine. Maggie reluctantly enlists the aid of Kai Arviso, an unconventional medicine man, and together they travel the rez, unraveling clues from ancient legends, trading favors with tricksters, and battling dark witchcraft in a patchwork world of deteriorating technology. As Maggie discovers the truth behind the killings, she will have to confront her past if she wants to survive. Welcome to the Sixth World.

In this first-ever anthology of Indigenous science fiction, Grace Dillon collects some examples of the craft, with contributions by Native American, First Nations, Aboriginal Australian, and New Zealand Maori authors.

Imagining Indigenous futurisms -- The native slipstream. Custer on the slipstream / Gerald Vizenor -- Aunt Parnetta's electric blisters / Diane Glancy -- from The fast red road : a plainsong / Stephen Graham Jones -- from Flight / Sherman Alexie -- Contact. from Refugees / Celu Amberstone -- from The black ship / Gerry William -- Men on the moon / Simon Ortiz -- Indigenous science and sustainability. from Midnight robber / Nalo Hopkinson -- from Darkness in St. Louis : bearheart / Gerald Vizenor -- from Mindscape / Andrea Hairston -- from Land of the golden clouds / Archie Weller -- Native apocalypse. Distances / Sherman Alexie -- When this world is all on fire / William Sanders -- from The moons of Palmares / Zainab Amadahy -- from Red spider, white web / Misha -- Biskaabiiyang, "returning to ourselves." Terminal Avenue / Eden Robinson -- from Almanac of the dead / Leslie Marmon Silko -- from The bird is gone : a monograph manifesto / Stephen Graham Jones -- from Star waka / Robert Sullivan (Ngā Pushi).

From the 1960s to the present, activists, artists, and science fiction writers have imagined the consequences of climate change and its impacts on our future. Authors such as Octavia Butler and Leslie Marmon Silko, movie directors such as Bong Joon-Ho, and creators of digital media such as the makers of the Maori web series Anamata Future News have all envisioned future worlds during and after environmental collapse, engaging audiences to think about the earth's sustainability. As public awareness of climate change has grown, so has the popularity of works of climate fiction that connect science with activism. Today, real-world social movements helmed by Indigenous people and people of color are leading the way against the greatest threat to our environment: the fossil fuel industry. Their stories and movements--in the real world and through science fiction--help us all better understand the relationship between activism and culture, and how both can be valuable tools in creating our future. Imagining the Future of Climate Change introduces readers to the history and most significant flashpoints in climate justice through speculative fictions and social movements, exploring post-disaster possibilities and the art of world-making.

Speculative fiction -- encompassing both science fiction and fantasy -- has emerged as a dynamic field within Chicana/o and Latina/o studies, producing new critical vocabularies and approaches to topics that include colonialism and modernity, immigration and globalization, race and gender. The first collection engaging a Chicana/o and Latina/o speculative cultural production, Altermundos provides a comprehensive alternative to the view of speculative fiction as a largely white, male, Eurocentric, and heteronormative genre. It features original essays from more than twenty-five scholars as well as interviews, manifestos, short fiction, and new works from Chicana/o and Latina/o artists

Introduction: Putting the Pop in Latina/o Culture -- PART I. Televisual, Reel, Animated, Comic, Digital, and Speculative Pop Spaces -- 1. Latina/os On TV!: A Proud (and Ongoing) Struggle Over Representation and Authorship -- 2. Latino Film in the End Times -- 3. "¡Vámonos! Let's Go!": Latina/o Children's Television -- 4. Branding "Latinohood," Juan Bobo, and the Commodification of Dora the Explorer -- 5. Canta y no Llores: Life and Latinidad in Children's Animation -- 6. Beyond the "Digital Divide" and Latina/o Pop -- 7. Why Videogames: Ludology Meets Latino Studies -- 8. The Industry and Aesthetics of Latina/o Comic Books -- 9. Science Fiction and Latino Studies Today and in the Future -- 10. The Technology of Labor, Migration, and Protest -- PART II. Pop Poetics of Tongues Untied -- 11. Performing Mestizaje: Making Indigenous Acts Visible in Latina/o Popular Culture -- 12. Brown Bodies on the Great White Way: Latina/o Theater, Pop Culture, and Broadway -- 13. Siempre Pa'l Arte: The Passions of Latina/o Spoken Word -- 14. Postindustrial Pinto Poetics and New Millennial Maiz Narratives: Race and Place in Chicano Hip Hop -- 15. Punk Spanglish -- 16. Latino Radio and Counter Epistemologies -- PART III. Pop Artivist Reclamations -- 17. Hermandad, Arte and Rebeldía: Mexican Popular Art in New York City -- 18. Inexact Revolutions: Understanding Latino Pop Art -- 19. Installation Art, Transnationalism and the Chinese-Chicano Experience -- 20. Revising the Archive: Documentary Portraiture in the Photography of Delilah Montoya -- PART IV. Quotidian Pop -- 21. Farmworker-to-Table Mexican: Decolonizing Haute Cuisine -- 22. The Rituals of Health -- 23. Lowrider Publics: Aesthetics and Contested Communities -- 24. Barrio Ritual and Pop Rite: Quinceañeras in the Folklore-Popular Culture Borderlands -- 25. Cultura Joteria: The Ins and Outs of Latina/o Popular Culture -- 26. Raza Rockabilly and Greaser Cultura -- 27. Bodies in Motion: Latina/o Popular Culture as Rasquache Resistance -- 28. Claiming Style, Consuming Culture: The Politics of Latina Self-Styling and Fashion Lines -- 29. Latina/os and the American Sports Landscape -- 30. Latina/os in the American High School, Collegiate, and Community Sporting Landscape -- PART V. Pop Rituals of Life in Death -- 31. Saints and the Secular: La Santísma Muerte -- 32. Day of the Dead: Decolonial Expressions in Pop de los Muertos -- 33. Liberanos de Todo Mal/But Deliver Us from Evil: Latina/o Monsters Theory and the Outlining of our Phantasmagoric Landscapes -- 34. Narco Cultura -- 35. Smuggling as a Spectacle: Irregular Migration and Coyotes in Contemporary U.S. Latino Popular Culture -- Afterword. A Latino Pop Quartet for the Ontologically Complex Smartphone Age.

In a future Chicago, Beatrice Prior must choose among five predetermined factions to define her identity for the rest of her life, a decision made more difficult when she discovers that she does not fit into any one group.

In a future where most people have computer implants in their heads to control their environment, a boy meets an unusual girl who is in serious trouble. Includes discussion questions and author notes.

Given his lifetime assignment at the Ceremony of Twelve, Jonas becomes the receiver of memories shared by only one other in his community and discovers the terrible truth about the society in which he lives.

Could you survive on your own, in the wild, with everyone fighting against you? Twenty-four are forced to enter. Only the winner survives. In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. Each year, the districts are forced by the Capitol to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the Hunger Games, a brutal and terrifying fight to the death -- televised for all of Panem to see. Survival is second nature for sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who struggles to feed her mother and younger sister by secretly hunting and gathering beyond the fences of District 12. When Katniss steps in to take the place of her sister in the Hunger Games, she knows it may be her death sentence. If she is to survive, she must weigh survival against humanity and life against love.

Sixteen-year-old Thomas wakes up with no memory in the middle of a maze and realizes he must work with the community in which he finds himself if he is to escape.