Science Fiction & Thanksgiving
**SPOILER WARNING** This is what is on my mind this morning, as I come back from a weekend where I went out to the movies twice, once to see Catching Fire and once to see the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special. There's a common thread that runs through both the recent Doctor Who seasons and the Hunger Games trilogy, and that is the effects of war on the survivors and the ethical struggles before and after making a decision to kill innocents in order to end a war. It's not really in Catching Fire that this question occurs; it's actually in the next book, Mockingjay . In it, there are two parts that I'm thinking of -- first, there's the decision by District 13 to bomb children and aid workers to advance the rage against the Capitol. Here's the description of when Katniss learns about the weapons that will eventually be used in that way: This is what they’ve been doing. Taking the fundamental ideas behind Gale’s traps and adapting them into weapons ag...