Oryx and Crake
by Margaret Atwood
I finally finished this book -- It took me months because the first
two-thirds were dry and boring. I liked The Handmaid's
Tale by Margaret Atwood,
so I gave this one a try. But I wouldn't recommend it. It is about biological
engineering
run amuck. Here are two quotes that I liked (most of the book is not this interesting)...
What they were looking at was a large bulblike
object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of
it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb
was growing.
"What the hell is it?" said Jimmy.
"Those are chickens," said Crake. "Chicken parts. Just breasts,
on this one.
They've got ones that specialize in drumsticks
too, twelve to a growth unit."
"But there aren't any heads," said Jimmy. He grasped the concept
-- he'd grown up with sus multiorganifer, after all -- but this
thing was going too far. At least the pigoons of his childhood hadn't lacked
heads.
"That's the head in the middle," said the woman. "There's a
mouth opening at the top, they dump the nutrients i there. No eyes or beak
or anything, they don't need those."
---
page 202, Oryx and Crake by Margaret
Atwood
As for Film-making and Video Arts, who needed
them? Anyone with a computer could splice together whatever they wanted,
or digitally alter old material, or create new animation. You could download
one of the standard core plots and add whatever faces you chose, and whatever
bodies too. Jimmy himself had put together a naked Pride
and Prejudice and
a naked To the Lighthouse, just for laughs, and in sophomore VizArts
at HelthWyzer he'd done The Maltese Falcon, with costumes by kate
Greenaway and depth-and-shadow styling by Rembrandt. that one had been good.
A dark tonality, great chiaroscuro.
-- page 187