Oryx and Crake

  

      Oryx and Crake is a disturbing epic that takes place in a post apocalyptic wasteland just a few weeks after a devastating man made plague has nearly extincted humanity. A lone survivor by the name of Snowman struggles with a wildly fluctuating climate as well as a menagerie of genetically engineered animals. The biggest threat are the pigoons, giant pigs originally farmed for human organ transplants. Some of them even have human brain tissue, originally developed by none other than Snowman's scientist father.     

      This isn't what most of the story is, however. Most of the story takes place in Snowman's flashbacks, when he still went by Jimmy and the world is separated into sprawling mega-slums called pleeblands and heavily militarized corporate city-states where the world's ruling class lives. Jimmy grew up in one of these compounds to a genetic engineer father and a mother who eventually becomes so disgusted with the compound that she escapes to join the environmental resistance. This environmental resistance is largely made up by a naturalist Christian religion called the God's Gardeners. But more on them later.

      By starting Jimmy's flashbacks in his early childhood, Atwood makes the reader analyze Jimmy's psyche from adolescence all the way up to his present self. A lot is revealed about his unhappy childhood and the effects his mother's absence has on him in particular. Combined with all the weird sexual stuff, it gives the book a Freudian feel.    

      Snowman isn't actually totally alone. He shares the wasteland with the ultimate genetic creation, a race of perfect, aesthetically pleasing humans called the children of Crake designed and created by his childhood  friend and genetic prodigy Glenn, who later takes the name Crake. They look like humans, but they mature to adulthood in just 7 years and die at age 30. They are herbivorous, living off of plants, roots, berries, and their own poop. The poop thing lets them get as much nutrients from a sparse diet as possible, and that ability was given to them by Crake from certain real life rabbit species. They are born with totally random skin colors in part to prevent racism from building in their tribal society. Also, they all emit natural insect deterrent sweat that makes them smell like citrus. Their most important attribute is that female children of Crake go into heat once a month and select multiple mates at a time. That way the children of Crake aren't constantly occupied with sex and experience none of the complications and pain caused by romantic love.


    The relationship between Jimmy and Glenn was one of my favorite parts of the book. It is tense and painful to read because Jimmy desperately wants companionship, but Glenn is basically a sociopath. He uses Jimmy as a pawn in his plot to extinct humanity with his engineered 100% fatal disease so that the children of Crake can inherit the rapidly re-greening Earth. Jimmy is hired as the advertising manager of a combination birth control/STD vaccine/aphrodisiac super drug, which is what Crake uses in secret to disseminate his plague. This is what keeps Jimmy occupied, but in reality Crake's plan is for Jimmy to become the protector of the children of Crake. Snowman fulfills this role and leads them across the wasteland to the coast, where they settle.  

     Glenn and Jimmy spend a lot of their free time together watching porno and public executions online, which at this point in the future is basically a normal thing to do. Sex and violence has become the ultimate commodity and the sex trade is a massive industry with an entire corporation devoted to it called SeksMart (dumb name). Watching child pornography together one day (I told you, its a very disturbing book) Jimmy first sees Oryx, who he later falls in love with after Crake finds her in the pleeblands and employs her to help with his genetic projects.    

   Snowman discovers that Crake's plague didn't kill everyone however. Snowman is told about a group of people that the children of Crake saw wandering the wasteland and he sets off to find them as he struggles with a severely infected foot. The book ends on a major cliffhanger as a feverish and starving Snowman reaches a group of three survivors gathered around a fire, the first humans he has seen since the plague.
   

Year of The Flood

    This book is told from the perspective of  two women who both were members of a religious cult called the God's Gardeners. Like Jimmy in Oryx and Crake the character's life story is described all the way from early childhood in the same flashback format of the first book.   

God's Gardeners

     The God's Gardeners are a new religious movement founded by Adam One, spiritual leader of the group and charismatic street prophet. Basically they are a super-hippy version of a Tolstoyan commune. They begin on an expansive rooftop garden in one of the most poor pleeblands and squat nearby abandoned buildings. All of their food is grown on the garden and everything else they have is dumpstered. Members are all strict vegans who try not to harm any animal life, even of insect pests. This element was an interesting take on Ahimsa from the Jain religion of India. The book follows the progression of the religion with short chapters that begin with a speech by Adam One and ends with a hymn from The God's Gardeners Oral Hymnbook, which was actually put to music. We learn in the final sermon by Adam One that although the God's Gardeners survive the initial epidemic, which they see as a biblical "waterless flood" sent to purify the Earth, infected survivors later bring them into contact with the virus and kill them all.

     Ren was brought to the Garden by her mother, who like Jimmy's mother left her comfortable life in the compound. Unlike Jimmy's mother she left for personal reasons. She had fallen in love with Zeb, a hardened but dashing eco-warrior who later causes a schism in the God's Gardeners as those who push for more active resistance split off to strike civilization with engineered bio-weapons. After having relationship problems with Zeb she decides to go back to the compound with Ren. Ren has at this point spent most of her life at the Garden and resents her mother for taking her away from it, and also misses her best friend Amanda, a Texan refugee who also survived the flood.

      Ren's family later moves her again to another compound and is put in the same high school as Jimmy and Glenn. Although Ren's relationship to Jimmy is only briefly mentioned in Oryx and Crake it was an extremely important part of Ren's life and she keeps thinking about Jimmy and if he has survived throughout the whole book. I thought that discrepancy was pretty strange and even thought that maybe Margaret Atwood hadn't even planned that from the beginning. At this school she also spends time with Glenn, but he remains just as mysterious as in Oryx and Crake.

      Toby is much older than Ren, and was one of her teachers back at the Garden. After being ruthlessly exploited by the corporations she joins the God's Gardeners out of desperation. They first kill her mother by using her as an unknowing guinea pig for freshly made microbes, which drives her father to suicide. At this point she is destitute and is given a job at a disgusting burger chain called SecretBurger (because the meat is secret) where she is preyed upon by her mafioso boss. This is where Adam One storms in and gives Toby a chance to join the God's Gardeners.

      Although they did save her and she is grateful, Toby never really made any decisions to stay in the group entirely on her free will. Not only did she not have much of a choice to leave SecretBurger, but the group emotionally manipulates her into becoming a full fledged member. She realizes it though and the reader can tell she holds a lot of deep down resentment of the group for it, even though she loves her fellow gardeners. 

     

     Adam One

        Now, I realize that they are kinda culty, but I would totally join them if they existed. People always hate on being a hippy, but it looks like loads of fun. Farming and gathering is a blast, you get to meet lots of pretty hippy girls, everybody is pretty healthy in general, and regular social standards of hygiene and nudity are relaxed.

      Year of the Flood seemed way more plausible than Oryx and Crake, solely because in the 6 years difference between the books so much real world technological "progress" has been made. For example, video cell phones are used in this book all the time while they weren't in Oryx and Crake. Overall the science they have is more in line with the trajectory that technology is taking today. The fact that it can be so different in just 6 years is an implicit, unintentional message in itself that this future really could happen. That is in line with Atwood's assertion that the novels aren't really science fiction, but speculative fiction.
 
      Despite being about religion, YoTF lost a lot of the biblical feel that made Oryx and Crake so good. I think what made it lose its epic qualities is its focus on the God's Gardeners community rather than a single individual. The brutality of Snowman's loneliness and diminishing sanity gave Oryx and Crake an edge that YoTF couldn't match. That isn't to say YoTF wasn't brutal. It was just as full of awful violence and crimes against nature as Oryx and Crake was, if not more so.

     A warning to those who want to read the trilogy: It will make you pretty miserable. And its not just because of the non-stop violence and tragedy, because you can expect that in a book about a biopunk corporate dystopia leading to total environmental collapse. What is most depressing is the complete lack of emotional depth in the characters. I can see why a lot of people wouldn't like the series for this reason, but I loved it. The lack of emotion was a very conscious decision by Margaret Atwood to put the focus of the story on morality.

     Overall, I enjoyed these books and im pretty excited for the last of the series, Maddaddam. I'm most interested in the story line's present and what will happen to the children of Crake. I also hope that the pigoons will play a larger part in the story, considering we don't know how smart they really are.What I would love most of all is for the third to have some parts from the perspective of Crake or at least anything that digs more into his motivations. Realistically though, it will focus on Zeb (who goes by the codename Maddaddam) and the other active resistors. I loved the kinds of bio-attacks they were mentioned using in this book, like microbes that cause asphalt roads to swell and puff out like marshmallows all over the southwest and mice that are compelled to chew through the engine belts of cars. I'm definitely most sympathetic to the Maddaddamites and can't wait for the new book.

My Feed

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     Choice is not liberty.They certainly have a lot of correlation, but to conflate one with another is extremely dangerous. The characters in Feed have a ridiculous amount of choice. They can take weekend trips to the moon, alter their appearance in drastic and scary ways, and design their own babies. But they live a vapid lifestyle based on oppression of others and the natural world. Part of the problem with thinking choice is the same as liberty lies in the bourgeoisie understanding of freedom. From that point of view freedom is thought of as a positive existing condition rather than a negation of any form of coercive authority.

    Although this book is the most likely scenario for our generation that we have read it reminded me most of 1984, which was probably the least likely. The big similarity is that in both dystopian worlds society has reached a point where resistance is impossible. The authors of both of these books seem to believe that once the trajectory of society down any authoritarian path has been followed through, be it state socialism or industrial capitalism, you reach a point of no return where nothing can stop it. It can either end in horrific collapse like Feed or it can reach an equilibrium that could possibly just go on forever, like 1984. I don't know how realistic the whole "point of no return" thing is, but it is always something to consider.

     Would I resist the feed? It wouldn't really be my decision. With the exception of Violet the young characters in the book didn't choose the feed. Considering that public school has been privatized and no longer teaches reading and writing or any other non-feed skills, there would be no way to get information outside of what you get from the feed. Although resistance movements are mentioned in the book none of them pose any real danger to the social order.


     I don't think that any significant resistance to the feed was meant to be possible, just like any attempt to resist the Party of Oceania is useless. But does resistance have any value if it is in the end entirely futile?  I think so. Many of those who have lost their lives resisting oppression think so. If an oppressive society follows a disastrous path that ends up destroying the natural world like in Feed, then those that survive (if any do) will know that at least some tried to fight back. 

Choose your own-cultural heritage

     The idea of cultural heritage is a tricky one. At its most basic, it is an extremely important and positive part of society. Indigenous cultures of any geographic location share the same qualities of communal values and an ecological mindset. Literally every primitive human culture developed a distinct shamanistic spiritual sphere based around both professional and lay practitioners alike that have in-depth knowledge of their people's culture and mythology.

     Sadly, cultural heritage has been largely appropriated by nationalists. What began as shared traditions based around unique and autonomous communities has been institutionalized. Having just ended another holiday consumptive cycle, Christmas is a perfect example of this. I could talk for a long time about why I hate Christmas so much and you probably know what im going to say anyway, so ill condense it into one short sentence: it is a holiday based on materialism. I don't care if you think that it is actually about family or love or Christ or whatever, the main focus of it has been consumption for a long time. And for those who rather would spend the day in church or some alternative way of celebrating from the standard tree-sacrifice gift-ritual the social pressure from the dominant culture is tremendous. So tremendous that it has spread far beyond its original home in white Western European Christian culture. Now Hanukkah, which had traditionally had never been a gift giving holiday, has basically become the Jewish analogue to Christmas. It is probably the only Jewish holiday most Americans know anything about and it isn't even a High Holiday.

     When culture is institutionalized like that it becomes something totally different. It becomes "national identity". Nothing disgusts me more than it.
   


     The novels 1984 and Feed depict a future where heritage has been completely washed away by the cultural hegemony. In 1984 society has been stripped down to its most bare, utilitarian functions leaving no room for cultural heritage. The power of culture to create affinities that lie outside of, and contrary to, state power can be compared to the sexual, romantic, or familial bonds that The Party also despises. 

      Feed shows a culture that had become so ridiculously capitalistic and industrialist that culture has become a commodity and nothing more. In this way culture loses its deeper emotional meanings. So basically everything is like Christmas. 

     Handmaid's Tale shows an America where the cultural heritage of Christianity and even some elements of European paganism have been co-opted by the state and used to form an extremely powerful national identity based on white supremacy and patriarchy. This is much more realistic than 1984 or feed, because why would an empire reject culture if it can instead make it into an immensely powerful tool of social control?
   
     Cultural hegemony doesn't just affect traditions and oral history or less tangible concepts like morality, but it is just as important to look at actual geographic locations. Nationalists love to strip monuments and historical sights of their original histories and meanings so that they can turn them into bland patriotic symbols.

     Stonehenge is an example of the kind of alienated state "protection" of "national treasures" (vomit) that I hate. I saw it a couple months ago and was very disappointed. The whole thing is roped off and the closest you ever actually get to it is like 50 feet! It should be treated like a living part of cultural heritage (and even worship) rather than something to be viewed and analyzed from a distance. When people can't have an actual connection with the site itself and cant communally value it as a LIVING site, what is it really besides a big pile of old  rocks? Its like the difference between looking at the Dome of The Rock at a distance and actually taking part in a procession around it.

Blindness

      Blindness is a book about what happens when society is dissolved nearly instantly. Personally, I think that the concept of an epidemic of blindness is the best part of the book. Combined with Saramago's strange writing style it succeeds in creating a more chaotic atmosphere than any of the other books we have read. This is ironic because it also has the least physical destruction of any of the books we have read. A lot of cars crashed as a result of spontaneous blindness and every surface is quickly being covered in a layer of poop, but otherwise everything has been left alone. It is fitting because the focus of this book is not on larger society, but on the relations of smaller groups. First the group of a few hundred in the asylum and later an even smaller band of about ten people. I didn't like that aspect of the book at first, but I started to like it after the asylum had burnt down.   
     
      About the style. It was brutal. I had to read this book in very short spurts of 15 minutes at a time. The only other book I have read that was written like this is One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude is also written with very long run-on sentences, but it does use quotations and paragraphs. I wonder if this is partly caused by tricky translation from the original languages. Maybe Blindness is a lot less harsh to read in its original Portuguese.

     Frankly, I had no idea what this book was all about or what Jose Saramago was trying to say. I know this book had a lot of statements about humanity and society and stuff but it all went over my head I guess. After I learned Saramago was a hard-core anarchist communist I really wished I had understood more of it. In the part of the book that takes place in the asylum Saramago seemed to take a very pessimistic view on humanity. This changes when the people being terrorized by the criminal element rise up together and revolt. This micro-revolution marks a redemption of the characters pride. From this point on the book becomes more optimistic. The smaller group led by the seeing woman may not be much better off materially, but the solidarity of the smaller collective gives them back their humanity. Saramago makes the fundamentally anarchist point that small groups based on affinity are far superior to the kind of forced collectivity of the asylum. At least I understood that part.