Writing in The New Yorker last year, Laura Miller suggested that “The Hunger Games” is most coherent when read as “a fever-dream allegory of the adolescent social experience”: doesn’t everything feel like life or death on the battlefield known as the high-school cafeteria? Many of Collins’s fans surely see “The Hunger Games” through this prism (one children’s-bookstore owner told me the books would be a good tool for teachers broaching the subject of popularity). For protective parents, reading “The Hunger Games” as an allegory of adolescence rather than of war may be more comfortable. But this is not a theory that appeals to Collins. “I don’t write about adolescence,” she said. “I write about war. For adolescents.”

Collins’s fiction inevitably echoes other dystopian literature in which states subject their citizens to novel forms of oppression, like George Orwell’s “1984” or Margaret Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale.” Even more pronounced are the similarities between “The Hunger Games” and “Battle Royale,” a Japanese novel published in 1999. Each book involves young people selected at random and pitted against one another in a game of survival staged by tyrannical authorities. The parallels are striking enough that Collins’s work has been savaged on the blogosphere as a baldfaced ripoff. The authors share an interest in the mechanisms of state control, but their agendas clearly diverge. “Battle Royale” is a more deliberate study of adolescence, its coming-of-age savageries and posturings. “You’ve become quite a stud,” a dying girl tells the classmate who cradles her in his arms. When it was published, “Battle Royale” played into Japan’s fears about a rise in youth violence; Collins’s heroes are, if anything, models of responsibility. When I asked Collins if she had drawn from “Battle Royale,” she was unperturbed. “I had never heard of that book or that author until my book was turned in. At that point, it was mentioned to me, and I asked my editor if I should read it. He said: ‘No, I don’t want that world in your head. Just continue with what you’re doing.’ ” She has yet to read the book or to see the movie.

There are enough possible sources for the plot line that the two authors might well have hit on the same basic setup independently (outrageous reality-television shows arrived in Japan before they did in the United States). As her primary influence, Collins, who has a love of classical plays, frequently cites the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, in which the people of Athens are required by their Cretan adversaries to offer up seven boys and seven girls for sacrifice to the deadly Minotaur, a half-human monster who lives in a maze. “I was also heavily influenced by the historical figure Spartacus,” she said. “Katniss follows the same arc from slave to gladiator to rebel to face of a war.”

“Battle Royale” does present an interesting precedent in one respect. When it was adapted into a film in Japan in 2000, politicians denounced its gory youth-on-youth violence, even as the Japanese film academy nominated it for nearly every prestigious award. The makers of the “Hunger Games” movie hope to avoid a similar controversy. The director, Gary Ross, has pledged that it will be safe for viewers as young as 12. But it is one thing to depict bloodshed on paper, another to do so on film. Collins was enlisted to write the original script. Ross, whose films include “Big” and “Pleasantville,” completed the final treatment, consulting heavily with Collins. In February, she flew out to Los Angeles to discuss sets, costumes and changes to the script. Though many directors might find such collaboration burdensome, Ross seems to welcome it. When Collins, looking at a set design, pointed out that the government building on a town square needed to loom more prominently — as a more obvious symbol of power — Ross agreed. Collins has been included in casting discussions as well. “I want her to be on the set as much as possible,” Ross said. “I’d like her next to me every day.”

While Collins was working on the first book of “The Underland Chronicles,” she spent hours on the phone with her father, plotting strategic alliances that would make military sense. “We had two superpowers, the humans and the bats,” she said, “but the humans were dependent on the alliance with the bats, because then they became aerial fighters.” Her father died before the first book was published, but he continues to exert an influence on her writing. The project she is exploring most actively right now is a children’s book based on the year he was serving overseas. Her most autobiographical work to date, it will use her family members’ names; illustrations will be based on family photographs from that era. “I specifically want to do this book, one as a sort of memory piece kind of honoring that year for my family, and two, because I know so many children are experiencing it right now — having deployed parents,” Collins said. “And it’s a way I would like to try and communicate my own experience to them.”

Collins is also researching another young-adult series (typically cautious, she would not say more). As for the change in her own family’s fortunes, she said that she has been slow to feel it, because of how payments are structured in publishing. For now, she seems intent on doing as much as she can to avoid becoming someone who would be, God forbid, recognized on the street. “I’m not a very fancy person,” she said. “I’ve been a writer a long time, and right now ‘The Hunger Games’ is getting a lot of focus. It’ll pass. The focus will be on something else. It’ll shift. It always does. And that seems just fine.”

Coming from most authors, this might sound like obligatory modesty. Coming from Collins, it sounds as if she knows her history.