New Hunger Games prequel??

Suzanne Collins has been quiet since releasing the last Hunger Games book in 2010 and I think many of us assumed she’d taken the money and gone off to retire in a castle somewhere, Enya-style.

But today she surprised the world by announcing a new novel in the same universe. This one takes place 64 years before Girl on Fire, Katniss Everdeen, made her debut.

The Associated Press is reporting that this new novel, currently untitled, will be released on 19 May 2020.

“With this book, I wanted to explore the state of nature, who we are, and what we perceive is required for our survival,” Collins is quoted as saying. “The reconstruction period 10 years after the war, commonly referred to as the Dark Days — as the country of Panem struggles back to its feet — provides fertile ground for characters to grapple with these questions and thereby define their views of humanity.”

The original Hunger Games trilogy spurred a whole subgenre of post-apocalyptic fiction and has been given credit for the rise of YA in general. So I’m really excited to see what the author does with a new story.

But am I the only person in the world who is so over prequels?

The trouble with prequels is you already know how everything pans out. Sure, we don’t know what happens to the specific characters, but how successful can they be considering what the world’s like at the start of The Hunger Games?

I had this problem with Star Trek too. I want to know what happens after Voyager, without playing a really badly scripted online game. (I’m hoping for this with Picard). Of course, Harry Potter is another prime example of a creator building backwards rather than forward.

I wonder why this is the case? Is it because the authors want to use all the world building they did initially? Or are they simply afraid to imagine what happens next?

Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

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