Book 93: "Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Atwood
Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 17:57![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittiwakeOn day one they toured some of the wonders of Watson-Crick. Crake was interested in everything - all the projects that were going on. He kept saying "Wave of the future," which got irritating after the third time.
First they went to Decor Botanicals, where a team of five seniors was developing Smart Wallpaper that would change colour on the walls of your room to complement your mood. This wallpaper - they told Jimmy - had a modified form of Kirilian-energy-sensing algae embedded in it, along with a sublayer of algae nutrients, but there were still some glitches to be fixed. The wallpaper was short-lived in humid weather because it ate up all the nutrients and then went grey; also it could not tell the difference between drooling lust and murderous rage, and was likely to turn your wallpaper an erotic pink when what you really needed was a murky, capillary-bursting greenish red.
That team was also working on a line of bathroom towels that would behave in much the same way, but they hadn't yet solved the marine-life fundamentals: when algae got wet it swelled up and began to grow, and the test subjects so far had not liked the sight of their towels from the night before puffing up like rectangular marshmallows and inching across the bathroom floor.
I thought this story sounded interesting and bought it soon after it came out in paperback, but I had been putting off reading it as I am not a huge Atwood fan. But now that I've read it, it is definitely my favourite of Margaret Atwood's novels. If it was up to me she would stop writing books about passive-aggressive women and their uninteresting problems, and stick to speculative fiction.
Oryx and Crake is a futuristic tale of a world reliant on genetic manipulation, and how one man brings about the downfall of human civilisation. Snowman tells the sad story of his relationship with his best friend Crake, and Oryx, the woman they both love, and how he came to be the guardian and priest of the post-human Crakers after a plague kills off the rest of the human race.
"I'm not just any dead man," he says out loud.
Of course not! Each one of us is unique! And every single dead person is dead in his or her very own special way! Now, who wants to share about being dead, in our own special words? Jimmy, you seem eager to talk, so why don't you begin?
Oh torture. Is this purgatory, and if it is, why is it so much like the first grade?
First they went to Decor Botanicals, where a team of five seniors was developing Smart Wallpaper that would change colour on the walls of your room to complement your mood. This wallpaper - they told Jimmy - had a modified form of Kirilian-energy-sensing algae embedded in it, along with a sublayer of algae nutrients, but there were still some glitches to be fixed. The wallpaper was short-lived in humid weather because it ate up all the nutrients and then went grey; also it could not tell the difference between drooling lust and murderous rage, and was likely to turn your wallpaper an erotic pink when what you really needed was a murky, capillary-bursting greenish red.
That team was also working on a line of bathroom towels that would behave in much the same way, but they hadn't yet solved the marine-life fundamentals: when algae got wet it swelled up and began to grow, and the test subjects so far had not liked the sight of their towels from the night before puffing up like rectangular marshmallows and inching across the bathroom floor.
I thought this story sounded interesting and bought it soon after it came out in paperback, but I had been putting off reading it as I am not a huge Atwood fan. But now that I've read it, it is definitely my favourite of Margaret Atwood's novels. If it was up to me she would stop writing books about passive-aggressive women and their uninteresting problems, and stick to speculative fiction.
Oryx and Crake is a futuristic tale of a world reliant on genetic manipulation, and how one man brings about the downfall of human civilisation. Snowman tells the sad story of his relationship with his best friend Crake, and Oryx, the woman they both love, and how he came to be the guardian and priest of the post-human Crakers after a plague kills off the rest of the human race.
"I'm not just any dead man," he says out loud.
Of course not! Each one of us is unique! And every single dead person is dead in his or her very own special way! Now, who wants to share about being dead, in our own special words? Jimmy, you seem eager to talk, so why don't you begin?
Oh torture. Is this purgatory, and if it is, why is it so much like the first grade?
