Oryx and Crake and The Handmaid's Tale and a bunch of stuff

A couple of years ago, Margaret Atwood visited the Göteborg Book and Library Fair and was interviewed about her novel Oryx and Crake.

This story of hers has a few things in common with some of her earlier work. For instance, like The Handmaid's Tale, it is also set in the near future, at a time when Earth has been devastated by some kind of human-created catastrophe -- though this time it is nothing mild like a slump in birthrates, but something much more severe. In any case, although the novel begins with this post-apocalyptic vision, of more interest than the catastrophe itself are the trends and attitudes that have lead to such chaos, retrospectively explored in the rest of the novel.

"Oh, no! The typical SF cautionary tale of the 1984 or Brave New World kind" you're thinking. But hold your horses. First because, although this novel does have something of the cautionary, there are in it many original elements. Second, because she goes beyond issuing warnings, into the land of proposing-questions-without-answer. And third because i didn't like that smug SF comment very much. It shocked me that Margaret Atwood herself, like a lot of other well and not so well read people, has this prejudice against Science Fiction. At the fair she argued that none of her novels "fit into that genre because there are no spaceships anywhere in them". General chuckles followed.

Excuse me! As if SF always contained some deus ex machina to dumbly resolve the plot, or as if character development and depth were not possible in fantastical settings. Of course, BAD SF does these things; maybe you were unlucky enough to read the story of princess Dejah Toris of Mars, kidnapped by the vicious four armed green men of Tark and finally rescued by John Carter, muscle-loaded explorer from Earth, after innumerable fights won by the bravery of his tireless arm. I suffer with you, then. But if I were to judge modern Norwegian fiction based on the work of Kristin Valla alone (never, never and, again, never be tempted to buy Nutmeg), I would have cut my wrist open with a cucumber, already.

If you've had one or more bad experiences with SF, it's probably too much to ask you to give it one more try. If you've never read any but are simply running on grade A prejudice --unleaded-- then give Octavia Butler's Lilith's Brood a try, and then tell me about it.

And now don't change the topic anymore, all right? I'm supposed to be telling you why and where Oryx and Crake is different from The Handmaid's Tale. It is true that, as in her earlier work, she creates the reality of her novel by throwing together bits and pieces of actual fact. She draws from historical episodes, recent political or social ideas (marginal and not so marginal), magazine or newspaper articles, etc.. In THT she was contesting a certain type of feminism that asks for protection instead of freedom; she was also issuing a warning against absolutist regimes and that way they have of creeping on us (look at the world today, particularly America). You know, that way we have of looking around us or behind us, back in time, and thinking: "That happens there, or it happened then, but I can't happen here and now". And then, next thing we know, we're looking down and finding we've stepped right on it, all squashy and smelly, precisely as a result of our necks swivelling around so much instead of looking at where we're going and grabbing the reins a little.

By the way, have you noticed how so many political crises in history are caused by really hard working, Zealous Extremists who, because of their zeal, really affect things? The one danger of being tolerant is that tolerance can easily become indolence, an easy opening for Mr. Z.E.

Anyhow. In Oryx and Crake an important part of Atwood's building blocks come from the quarry of the present biological revolution. Throughout the story you find phosphorescent rabbits of a soft green hue, goats that produce spider silk, kangaroo/lamb splices praised as superior cattle because they can produce tastier meat while farting less CO2 into the atmosphere, and pigs ('pigoons', in the novel) that can donate a kidney or even neural tissue to the needy. The wild imagination of this woman! Right?

Wrong! Some of these beings already exist, and they're even patented! Patented like the glowing rabbit produced by researchers in answer to a request from artist Eduardo Kac, from Chicago (they injected jellyfish DNA into the rabbit's embryo). Or like the nanny goats developed by BioSteel, a Canadian company that hopes to extract stronger-than-steel, spider-silk-based fibre from their milk. PPL Therapeutics PLC, the company that cloned Dolly, announced last year that four piglets were born that lack the two genes that cause human rejection of transplanted pig organs. So research on the pigoon front is coming along fine, say researchers! The lamb/kangaroo combination is out there already, too, according to Atwood, but I couldn't find anything about it on the web. In any case, her imagination isn't that wild after all.

The guy who was interviewing her in Göteborg went on and on about how unfair it is for her to portray science under such a negative light and the future in such a pessimistic way. The most annoying bit of it all was that he didn't even say it outright! He kept hinting at it, prodding her, as if he were afraid to openly contradict such an important author. And so the 45 minutes of the seminar went by like that. At one point she said "Are you going to ask me anything about the book?" But he didn't. Bummer.

I don't think genetic manipulation per se is wrong, but it does scare me that whatever work is being done today in that area is being pulled forward by the prospect of making profits. Be that as it may, the point of this novel is ultimately neither about the technology it mentions, nor the future it is set in. Those are just background. The topic of genetics opens the road for one of Atwood's characters to ask the central question of the novel, which is whether we are what we are because of what evolution made us.

And what are we? If her characters are any indication, let's say she means to signify that it's a tad hard for us to be good, decent people. In Oryx and Crake nobody's innocent. Everybody's at least an accomplice to acts of violence. Yet there are acts of kindness, too, and hopeful bittersweet searches, and unrealised yearnings, and loneliness and dejection. We're all of them put together, thankewverymuch says the novel, and what do you propose we do about that?

For her ending, Atwood creates a situation in which she dumps all the weight of decision (but what decision?) on you, her reader. Like I'm doing now, because I'm telling you no more.