While doing (ultimately wholly unproductive) research for my Extended Essay I came across this exceptionally scathing book review by John Clute that outlines what he feels are the major failings of Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake. (The edition featured in that Amazon link, by the way, is beautifully typeset.)
In particular, one the arguments he makes is that Atwood’s vision of a purportedly technologically-advanced future is decidedly outmoded and retro, even when taken in the context of our modern day; thus precluding any sort of commentary she might have intended on humanity’s plausible socio-cultural trajectories:
And Atwood’s vision of the future of the Internet has to be experienced to be believed:
When they weren’t playing [seriously old-fashioned computer] games they’d surf the Net—drop in on old favourites, see what was new. They’d watch open-heart surgery in live time, or else the Noodie News. … Or they’d watch animal snuff sites, Felicia’s Frog Squash and the like. … Or they’d watch dirtysockpuppets.com, a current-affairs show about world political leaders. … Or they might watch hedsoff.com, which played live coverage of executions. … Shortcircuit.com, brainfrizz.com, and deathrowlive.com were the best; they showed electrocutions and lethal injections….
“What is this shit?” said Crake. “Channel change!”
And so on, and it becomes increasingly clear that Atwood’s got something deeply wrong here—that she’s satirizing yesterday in the language of the day before yesterday, 1990 in the language of 1960; and that she’s not taking her sci-fi potshots at the Net at all, but at cable television.
It is indeed ironic that Clute should find the prevalence of video over the Internet passé, for, since circa 2006, the World Wide Web’s consumer-fueled existential circumstance has been exactly that. Moreover, and eerily enough - as minute or two on Google will attest - such gems as this video of ‘open-heart surgery’ already pepper our increasingly media-rich networks.
Clute entirely fails to consider that a cultural trend (a predilection for video in this case) can be intransigently recurrent despite the unrelenting advance of technology. What really ‘has to be experienced to be believed’ is the extent that Clute’s imagination is embalmed in its myopic notions of a future with so hidebound a range of possibilities that even video over the Internet - already in existence for as long as RealPlayer has pushed its adware infested bloat upon unsuspecting users - is alien enough to be denigrated as a vestige of the past. Or perhaps, conversely, he is expecting far too much from the fabrication of near futures - warp drive, universal translator, holodeck, who-knows-what - also reflecting a narrow-mindedness; this time for the inability to accept human ingenuity as somehow limited.
I would argue that Atwood’s contextualization of a contiguous (to our present) milieu is fairly believable in some respects, especially technology-wise - yet, as our society stands today, it would have to do much worse to match the utterly depraved world as depicted in Oryx and Crake. Atwood excels at forceful hinting: she puts the fictional dystopia well within our reach, but it is necessarily too slippery at present to grasp. Perhaps as the sands of time trickle into our half of the hourglass we might garner enough friction for the deplorable task.
