Astronomical Profits from Hunger Games Cows Reviewers into Ignoring Story was Lifted from Japanese Novel

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Hunger Games Lifted from Japanese Film

While I have often enough murmured the cliche that "nothing surprises me anymore," that was before sitting down this afternoon to watch a 1999 Japanese film called Battle Royale (バトル・ロワイアル). What shocked me to the core was this. The story line for American author Suzanne Collins's 2008 bestseller Hunger Games was lifted point by point from the earlier Japanese bestseller by Koushun Takami  (adapted to film in the year 2000). Has author Suzanne Collins no shame,  prancing  around the country holding guest appearances and making gazillions from a foreign movie she copied practically word for word?  Perhaps her publisher’s slick attorneys assumed the copy and paste job would never get traced back because the original was in the Japanese language.  Aren't there supposed to be laws against this sort of thing?  Or has the publishing industry fallen on such hard times, that it will prostitute any semblance of respectability for whatever cold cash it can grub?

I hope we’re not seeing a new trend in American book selling, stealing works from authors living in countries whose social and legal etiquette make them too polite to sue the crap out of plagiarists?  As the book industry has shrunk to a handful of mega-publishers representing a handful of mega-authors,  I have also noticed another disquieting trend.   Too many American book reviewers  apparently see their job as hobnobbing with famous authors and never ever slapping the hand that passes out those gilded invitations.  How else could New York Times reviewer John Green write that this plagiarized novel was "brilliantly plotted and perfectly paced" or that  "the considerable strength of the novel comes in Collins's convincingly detailed world-building and her memorably complex and fascinating heroine?" A Time Magazine review praised the book as “hypnotic.”  When controversies such as this arise, any reviewer too arrogant, lazy or cowardly to sit through the foreign sub-titled original in order to make an honest comparison needs to be fired.

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