Build worlds, that’s what novelists do, and then they fill them with their people. Sometimes these fictional worlds are separated from ours by the thinness of tissue paper, and by the time lag of a minute. Other times they are moonscapes, unrecognizable to our eyes, set in years long past or years far yet to come. Margaret Atwood, in her Oryx and Crake trilogy, builds her characters into a future world that sometimes feels very strange, many years ahead of today, but upon reflection often may be right here, right around the corner.
It’s hot, the Crakers’ world, and seemingly absent of seasons. In MaddAddam Zeb heads north to work for Bearlift, an ecological do-good organization that flies garbage up near the Arctic Circle to dump for the polar/grizzlies to scavenge. It’s summer, and there’s not much sign of cold. Only “postcard snow on the tops” of the mountains remains, and after his crash, Zeb has to hike out across miles of empty tundra.
The northern ice is mostly melted; thus polar bears are mating with grizzlies and learning to live without ice floes and seals, making do with tundra and airlifted offal. In the lower forty-eight, where most of the novels’ action takes place, kudzu grows rampant, and humans cannot survive unprotected from the sun. Every afternoon a torrential storm blows in. In Oryx and Crake Jimmy (later Snowman, or Snowman the Jimmy) “wakes to thunder and a sudden wind: the afternoon storm is upon him. He scrambles to his feet, grabs his sheet. Those howlers can come on very fast…. Sometimes there are hailstones as big as golf balls, but the forest canopy slows their fall.”
Religion is an active participant in Atwood’s global warmed world. Zeb’s murderous father starts his own “Church of the PetrOleum, affiliated with the somewhat more mainstream Petrobaptists.” Oil is their sacrament: “They’d thank the Almighty for blessing the world with fumes and toxins, cast their eyes upwards as if gasoline came from heaven.”
Old New York is mostly underwater, and New New York has appeared in New Jersey. No surprise, really: our world today is already whipsawed by rising oceans, horrific winters, floods and fires. The bad weather is coming. In Margaret Atwood’s future, climate change has fully arrived.
Missing from her vision, surprisingly, is government. There is no mention in any of the three novels of a president, member of congress, governor, mayor, even town council member. [Well, okay, I found one: in MaddAddam Zeb considers trying to “code in his own virtual senator or something – just as a demo project about how easy it was.” What does that say about senators?] In the meantime Zeb rockets all over the country on bullet trains, bums his way down to Mexico and up through Canada; and there is no mention of any governmental agency anywhere. Then I think, why should there be? Our government today is a disgrace, peopled by meretricious, avaricious criminals bought by the corporations, who with the recent sanction of the Supreme Court steal from their constituents and accept bribes from those who seek favors. They don’t care a whit about us sheep. Recall that recently out of spite New Jersey officials created several days of impassable gridlock at the George Washington Bridge, deliberately endangering those who had to cross the Hudson, including emergency vehicles trying to get to hospitals. In Washington the Senate and House do absolutely nothing, sitting around namecalling in the cause of myopic principle, you liberal bastard, you teaparty asshole, while we – idiots, or more accurately powerless sheep (Mo’Hairs, they’re called in the trilogy), that we are – keep returning them to office. As Yeats once wrote, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.”
Into the vacuum left by non-government Atwood has dropped the Corporations. And why not? The Supreme Court has handed the political rights of people to corporations. Corporations aren’t people, however; they are unbelievably wealthy entities that buy up their representatives lock, stock, and teakettle so they may do whatever the hell they want. The Oryx/Crake world is run by the likes of HelthWyzer Corporation, a huge bioengineering corporation that creates all manner of gene splices, both animal and vegetable, without check. There are rakunks (raccoon/skunks), wolvogs (wolf/dogs), and pigoons (pigs that host human organs, thus very smart). Here the brilliant, insane Oryx creates the BlyssPluss pill, a combination of super aphrodisiac, super Xanax, super Viagra, super birth control – into which he slips the seeds for a plague to destroy the entire human race.
So it’s the corporations who run the show in Atwood’s trilogy. And who keeps the peace? Not the cops, not the military: it’s CorpSeCorps, the ruthless Corporation Security police, who rule the entire system with iron impunity. They control the web, which is ubiquitous. They have outlawed all firearms in the hands of private citizens. There are no trials; uncooperative citizens simply disappear. All control of all resources is held by the Corporations, and the CorpSeCorps makes sure those holdings are secure.
It’s hard to disagree with Atwood’s vision. No one today has the will or the capacity to stop climate change. With so much of the world’s wealth and power held in the hands of CEO’s or former CEO’s like Koch, Koch, Gates, Helu, Ortega, Zuckerberg, yadda, yadda, pretty clearly the corporate world makes all the critical decisions today. After all, corporations are people, right Supreme Court? Control is certainly beyond the ability of our do-nothing, posturing, hamstrung government. Atwood’s world, that desolate jungle peopled by Oryx, Crake, Zeb, Toby, and Snowman the Jimmy, is well on its way into our present. Just don’t take any BlyssPluss pills.
April, 2014 ©
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