A People's Future of the United States

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A People's Future of the United States

2019

There’s some great writing in this SF anthology, covering a range of sub-genres ranging from fantastical allegories to realistic extrapolations from the world of today.

And as the title implies, this anthology is heavy on the politically charged stories. The degree of explicit relevance to today’s politics varies depending on the story, but it’s safe to say none of the authors mean to inspire anyone to run out and work for the reelection of the current President of the United States.

A large proportion depict a United States that has taken a hard turn towards right-wing authoritarianism. I’ll get to those in a moment.

My favorite story in the collection is probably the first one, “The Bookstore at the End of America” by Charlie Jane Anders. This is a tale of a quirky bookstore straddling the border between an independent California and a reactionary United States of America, and its owner Molly, a memorable character doing her best the keep the peace between the two groups of customers. The worldbuilding is not black-and-white (the USA may be Gilead-lite, but some of the glimpses we get of techno-utopian California are highly unnerving in their own way) and the political barbs the bookstore’s customers exchange ring true. As an aside, I really ought to read some of Anders's novel-length output.

Other memorable stories include (among others):

“Chapter 5: Disruption & Continuity [Excerpted]” by Malka Older, an academic account of the societies that replace the disintegrating United States of the 2030s and 2040s, written with subtle but mind-bending temporal quirks.

“By His Bootstraps” by Ashok K. Banker, in which the President of the United States (clearly meant to be the office’s current 2019 inhabitant) watches with incomprehension and dismay as government research into time travel backfires, creating a USA that has retroactively been inclusive and tolerant from the beginning of its history.

“No Algorithms in the World” by Hugh Howey, a portrait of an older conservative man who believes strongly in values of hard work and having to earn one’s living, who cannot cope with the transition to a post-scarcity economy.

“ROME” by G. Willow Wilson, in which high school students take a high-stakes exam that absolutely cannot be rescheduled despite the massive fire ravaging their city and coming awfully close to the exam center.

As mentioned above, there are also many stories set in near-future USAs that have turned towards right-wing authoritarianism. I’m uncomfortably aware that in many of these settings, as a white cis hetero guy, I’d be allowed to live a relatively privileged life, especially if I kept certain opinions to myself.

Of these reactionary futures, I think the one that left the biggest impression on me was A. Merc Rustad’s “Our Aim Is Not to Die”, about Sua, a young, non-gender-binary teenager on the autism spectrum in a future USA where such perceived non-conformity is prohibited. Sua has a state-mandated medical checkup looming in a few days and the inevitable results will cause them to lose everything they have in their modest life. Sua is such an inoffensive character, utterly terrified. The ending gives Sua a reprieve from their fate, and leaves open the possibility that Sua might rise to a traditional notion of heroism -- or might not, and let the heroism to others, and that’s okay too.

These stories about dystopian American futures range from extrapolations based on contemporary politics, to far-out weirdness. “The Referendum” by Lesley Nneka Arimah looks at how a small group of people reacts to the government’s stripping away of rights for African-Americans, presented as a scarily plausible scenario; in “Calendar Girls” by Justina Ireland, a young purveyor of banned birth control products gets sucked into political intrigue surrounding a powerful politician who helped ban them. Meanwhile, in “Give Me Cornbread or Give Me Death” by N. K. Jemisin, oppressed communities turn the tables on their oppressors by taming the dragons that have been bred to intimidate them.

These future authoritarianisms hit me, personally, uncomfortably. Although I am an American citizen, I’ve lived abroad for most of my adult life. For the last 12 years I’ve lived in a country that could (arguably) be called the least authoritarian in Asia.

It’s not perfect. For one thing, the free press -- possibly the freest in Asia -- tends to focus on bloody sensationalism and partisan politics; for another thing, the lax libel laws are often misused by those with money to spare to harass people they don’t like. And that’s not even getting into the scary intersection of local politics and organized crime, or the blatant racism towards certain groups of outsiders (and I don’t mean Westerners). I’m not looking at this country with rose-colored glasses.

But for every problem mentioned above, there are local people working to make it better, and they have the freedom to do so without a tyrannical government harassing them and making their lives miserable.

And yet, it terrifies me that every knowledgeable person agrees that there is a real chance this country’s democracy could collapse within a few years. Not just degrade, but utterly collapse.

I don’t deny that, if that happens, as a non-citizen with a foreign passport I’ll have the opportunity to pick up and leave. And that does give me a degree of privilege. That doesn’t make me any less concerned about the place I have lived with my wife for twelve years, with our neighborhood, our friends, our jobs, our two cats.

And this has forced me to become more politically aware than I might have been otherwise. There is a lot to worry about, in many countries, not least the United States. The stories, characters and ideas in this collection can inspire us to go out there and work to improve things.

Ninefox Gambit

Ninefox Gambit

by Yoon Ha Lee, 2016

The line between science fiction and fantasy is a hazy one. This is why we have the useful catch-all term “speculative fiction,” filled with sub-genres that fade and bleed into each other.

That said, if I see anyone in a bookstore looking at Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee, I'd have to fight the urge to say: “I know it looks like a space opera, but maybe you should think of it as high fantasy. I’m not saying it’s not space opera. Those categories don’t have to be mutually exclusive.”

Then, a moment later: “No, not like Star Wars.”

I feel like saying this in order to to set expectations. It’s not just that the technology used in Ninefox Gambit is well within the “indistinguishable from magic” realm; it’s also that it is exceptionally weird and strange, and the reader faces a steep learning curve to figure out just how things in this universe work. Judging from comments I’ve seen online, more than one reader has found this universe difficult to get into and has left Ninefox Gambit unfinished.

So my suggestion is to approach Ninefox Gambit as a military novel in a very non-Tolkein high fantasy setting, with a magic system that may take a bit of mind-stretching to get one’s head around but is worth it in the end. That way, you’ll find it easier to enter the world of the Hexarchate, whose magic, er, I mean technology depends on the reality-defining effects of their calendar system. Calendar system? Yes indeed. In this world, if we all believe in the consensus calendar, it can be exploited using arcane mathematics to create reality-bending effects.

The Hexarchate, as its name implies, is divided into six primary parts, each led by its own ruthless genius called the Hexarch. (It used to be the Heptarchate, but one division was stamped out centuries ago.) One of them, the Kel, provide the bulk of the Hexarchate’s troops, and one of their specialties that we see in the novel is arranging themselves in various formations that bring about reality-bending effects within the Hexarchate’s calendar system. Our protagonist, Kel Cheris, has better-than-average skills for a Kel grunt at the exotic math one needs to master this, and so she is recruited to help fight an existential threat to the Hexarchate.

A heretical calendar is being propagated by a group that wants to restore the Heptarchate, and they’ve occupied the vast and heavily defended Fortress of Scattered Needles. At this point, I’m going to turn it over to Aidan Moher, who in his Tor.com review explained what’s going on much better than I can: “the heretics (the so-called “badguys”) are twisting this “reality engine” by breaking away from the hive-mind agreement that gives the government, the aforementioned heptarchate (which is the hexarchate by the time Ninefox Gambit begins), authority over the people and high-level technology.”

The Hexarchate’s secret weapon is Shuos Jedao, legendary tactical genius who was executed centuries ago after unnecessarily killing over a million people in the course of winning a battle. Jedao is too useful to rot in the grave, so the Hexarchate keeps his spirit around for when there’s an emergency that requires his skill set. Cheris is to be his vessel.

So now our hero Cheris has an insane undead general who has taken up residence in her shadow (and she is given alarming instructions on what to do if he starts misbehaving), and she is given command of a military force that heads for the Fortress of Scattered Needles. This is a violent and grim novel, and the exotic flavor of the weaponry does not make it any less so. It’s very bloody and a lot of characters die.

It’s also weirdly brilliant, and as it is the first novel in Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire trilogy, the remainder of the story is now on my reading list.

State Tectonics

State Tectonics

by Malka Older, 2018

A little after the halfway point of State Tectonics comes a scene that has stuck in my mind precisely because it is not far-fetched.

We see a recording of a middle-aged father and politician, Gerardo. He’s having an argument with his teenage daughter. His daughter sullenly accuses him of not listening to who she really is, of just wanting her to be an accessory to his photogenic political family, reserved, quiet, and pretty. Frustrated, Gerardo says he never told her to be pretty.

However, his daughter is a digital native of the late 21st century and knows exactly how to conjure up a damning video that she triumphantly plays for him on the spot, proving that he has done exactly that: telling her to be pretty. All her father can do is grumble: “When I was a kid, we didn’t have a perfect record of everything our parents had ever said to throw in their faces whenever we felt like it!”

It gets worse. Because this family quarrel happened in a public space, it was recorded and is publicly available, and because Gerardo is running in a major election, some activist has found it and boosted its profile. Now it is going viral. The teenage daughter is mortified and has holed up inside her home.

Gerardo and his kid aren't major characters in the story, but our main protagonist, the analyst, intelligence operative, and diplomat Mishima, watches this recording and is horrified. She has been recruited to run for office, largely against her better judgement. She has a young child. She doesn’t want this for her family.

What politician would want to run for office if every public spat or embarrassing moment they’ve ever had is fair game for signal boost? We’re already in a world where it’s relatively easy to dig up odd or dumb things a politician put online years ago -- heck, I can think of several examples, at varying degrees of weirdness, just since the beginning of 2019. Now combine that with remarkably complete publicly available feeds of public spaces everywhere. Who would ever want to be famous in this world?

Speculative fiction writers are generally uncomfortable with the notion that they’re trying to predict the future. Ursula K. Le Guin famously denied the notion in her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness. In a trivial sense, that’s true of Older’s work: the centenal system makes for a great thought experiment but it’s not easy to see how we can get there from here.

And yet, just as Le Guin’s work gave us glimpses of alternate political and social systems that expanded our sense of the possible, Older does the same, not only with issues of governance but also the knock-on effects of her late 21st-century information technology. As I wrote in my post on Null States: “These people are plugged into the online world to such a degree that it borders on telepathy.” You take this level of connectivity, combine it with a surveillance-heavy world, and a whole range of possible situations opens up, not least the ease with which anybody can be publicly embarrassed if enough people are willing to care about it.

State Tectonics is the conclusion of Older’s Centenal Cycle. Infomocracy introduced this world of statelets of roughly 100,000 people each that democratically choose their governments in global elections, overseen by the benevolent force of Information, the independent entity that has effectively replaced Google, Facebook, and the entire news media. Null States explored this world some more and gave new depth to Information.

Now in State Tectonics, Information, with its effective monopoly on, well, information, finds itself under direct attack from shadowy forces who would like to see its monopoly broken and small-i information made more democratic. As a reader, I have found the centenal system to be fascinating, but Information as depicted to be potentially sinister at best, even as Older takes pains to show us all the well-meaning, hard-working, competent people working there. I wonder what horrors occured in the Centenal Cycle world in the past that made people ready to accept Information. (And yet is Information really objectively worse than the situation we have in real-world actual 2019? Information as Older describes it isn’t a clear dystopia -- it’s more complicated than that.)

Mishima, analyst, spy, diplomat and politician, is once again front and center. Meanwhile, Information techie Maryam, a supporting character in the previous books, is now a full co-protagonist. Would it be fair to say that the gender breakdown of this series slants heavily female? Well, let’s just say that if you gender-flipped each and every character, the male-to-female ratio would be just about normal for a near-future technothriller. That’s how many female characters there are.

What’s more, Older doesn’t assume her readers will put the book down and wander off if they don’t get an American protagonist to root for. Off the top of my head, I don’t think any of the major characters of any book of the trilogy speaks English natively.

Having finished the Centenal Cycle, I can stand by what I wrote in my Null States post: “Its world of centenals, and global governments that compete for the right to govern them, feels like something new, not just familiar extrapolations from current geopolitical trends.” The information technology of this world is more of a clear extrapolation from what we have now, but it is well-thought-through and very well-integrated into the novel political setting.

This is good political speculative fiction, it expands my sense of what is possible, and I would like to read more like it.

Whit

Whit

by Iain Banks, 1995

Ever since I realized that I really liked Iain Banks’ writing style and ought to have read all of his books years ago, I’ve been erratically making my way through his body of work. His “Iain M. Banks” novels I’ve been (unnecessarily) trying to read in order, but his no-middle-initial novels I’ve been picking up at random as I find them at used bookstores.

Therefore, I'm drawing on a somewhat arbitrary knowledge of Banks' other work when I say Whit is the first Banks novel I’ve read with an honest-to-goodness female protagonist. (I don’t count Dr. Vosill of Inversions -- Banks never took us inside her head.) As a plucky, resourceful teenage girl, Isis Whit doesn’t exactly break new literary ground, but she’s an agreeable companion.

Whit is also the least violent Banks novel I’ve read. It's not exactly child-friendly, but I kept waiting for something over-the-top bloody and brutal to happen and it never did. It's misleading to say that this is a kinder and friendlier Banks novel given that there's more than one highly disturbing scene, but it's good to learn Banks was actually capable of writing a whole novel without spilling a great deal of fictional blood.

The Whit family business is a cult, the Luskentyrians, founded in the 1940s by Isis’s grandfather, the family patriarch Salvador Whit. The Luskentyrians live fairly isolated lives at their base in rural Scotland, where they abstain from most modern technology to keep their lives uncluttered, but they’re proud of Luskentyrians who go out into the world and set a good example among the “Unsaved” (also known as the “Bland” or the “Obtuse”).

One such Luskentyrian is Isis’s musician cousin Morag. The Luskentyrians have high hopes for her, but now they are worried that she might be leaving the faith. So Isis, granddaughter of the cult founder and next in line to lead the church (due to her February 29 birthday), is sent on a holy mission to London to find Morag and persuade her to remain in the faith…

But little does Isis know that she is being lied to, about many things, from many people. And over the novel’s second half, she puts the pieces together. Whit doesn’t really have the stunning ending plot twist or revelation common to many Iain Banks novels, but Isis does have to deal with a cascade of new information over the book’s latter chapters, and she does a commendably good job of calmly handling it (far better than I would have at her age).

In the end, Whit is pleasant and engaging. I’ve never encountered an Iain No-Middle-Initial Banks novel that failed to be pleasant and engaging. It's got a fair number of signature Banks authorial touches: the set piece where Isis accidentally discovers her cousin Morag's true vocation through a contrived, improbable coincidence is pulled off with narrative flourish, for example, so I shrugged and said "You get away with it this time, Banks!"

Many of the Luskentyrians’ beliefs and practices are presented as rather silly, and the cult itself turns out to be riddled with lies, but there’s still a sympathetic depiction of the sense of community that the Luskentyrians have built, and a sense in the final pages that the community can reform and improve itself if bad behavior is called out and deceptions at the heart of the community are exposed. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and all that.

This is all well and good, but part of me suspects that if we somehow got a peek at this fictional community 20 years later, we’d find that the new generation of leadership has become just as bad, and plucky teenage Isis has grown into cynical manipulative adult Isis. Maybe I'm too cynical for this story.

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Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories

Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories

by China Miéville, 2015

“Perhaps understanding’s overrated,” says William, a medical student assigned to study a cadaver whose bones, as he discovered, are inexplicably decorated with carvings. “Some of us are observers by nature, not philosophers.” He’ll never know where the designs came from, so he is content to work secretly in a rented room where he keeps the cadaver he stole, carefully stripping the man’s flesh from the bones.

The attitude, held by William in the story “The Design”, is also held by many other inhabitants of the stories that China Miéville wrote and collected in Three Moments of an Explosion. In “Polynia”, icebergs appear floating in the air above central London; in “Covehithe”, sunken oil rigs have come to life, laying their eggs on the coast like they've always been members of Earth’s ecosystem. This is not to say Miéville is writing solely ecological metaphors: more mind-bendingly strange than either of these is the behavior of the corpses described in “The Condition of New Death”, which have taken to behaving like dead bodies in video games.

By the time we catch up with them, the inhabitants of these stories are no longer asking about the whys and hows. The uncanny new situation is a fait accompli; the question is, what are we going to do now? How will we react and evolve now that consensus reality has become something that used to be unthinkable?

Not every story quite fits this pattern; a very few don’t use speculative-fiction tropes at all. “Dreaded Outcome”, about a therapist whose methods make use of her skills as a trained assassin, could make a good TV or film adaptation, though the dark humor would have to be calibrated exactly right.

These are the first Miéville short stories that I’ve read. I’ve enjoyed four of his novels in the past, and in these stories Miéville has struck me as a writer who prioritizes setting and situation over characters (not that he can’t write characters; he just doesn’t seem to prioritize it), and this suits the short story form perfectly.

Three of the shorter stories are actually blow-by-blow descriptions of movie trailers for imaginary movies. As a storytelling device, this impresses me a lot (Why didn’t I think of that!): Miéville is utilizing the well-known tropes of the movie trailer (“In a world where…”) to convey the outline of a story that he’ll never tell in detail.

There were a few stories that left me cold, generally because I felt I didn’t “get it”. For instance, “The Dusty Hat” will be better appreciated by someone with experience as a political activist. (I find politics fascinating, but if I were involved myself the frustration would drive me batty.) But that is a matter of personal taste more than anything.

In this post, I’ve used adjectives like “uncanny” and “mind-bendingly strange”; of course, what most people do with his fiction is call it “Weird”, often with a capital W because the weirdness defines a whole sub-genre. (His Wikipedia bio does this in the second sentence.) Miéville's situation-creating skills are second to none, and I ought to read more of his fiction. It’s been six years since I read Embassytown -- what should I pick up next?

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Null States

Null States

by Malka Older, 2017

Book two of Malka Older’s Centenal Cycle. It’s the second half of the 21st century, and most people live in centenals: political units of 100,000 people each, who democratically elect their chosen government every 10 years from a panoply of choices.

The Centenal Cycle has gotten under my skin -- in a good way -- more than most fiction works I’ve been reading lately. Its world of centenals, and global governments that compete for the right to govern them, feels like something new, not just familiar extrapolations from current geopolitical trends. It’s like a very well-done thought experiment, but Older’s succeeded in populating the world with well-written characters that fully inhabit it.

(By the way, I have not yet opened book three, State Tectonics, and so every bit of this post is written in perfect ignorance of what happens in it.)

Two years after the events of Infomocracy, we begin in Darfur, where emissaries of the planetwide network known as Information have arrived to meet with a local governor, but find themselves witnessing an assassination instead. Our main protagonist is Roz, an Information agent who’d been a prominent secondary character in the first book. The investigation into the murder involves untangling the political situation in Darfur: who wanted the governor dead?

Meanwhile, two of the stars of Infomocracy are crisscrossing Eurasia. Mishima used to be a full-time Information employee, but now she’s doing freelance analysis work based out of Saigon. Ken was a Policy1st operative, but he’s left his old organization now that it’s the global Supermajority -- the most powerful government worldwide. Now they’re both hopping round the hemisphere, with only time for an occasional romantic rendezvous, dealing with the residual scandals of the old Supermajority government Heritage and the ramifications of an expanding war in central Asia.

Of course, everything is connected, and Mishima and Ken find themselves drawn into the expanding Darfur investigation. Something low-key that I like about this series is that our main protagonists are primarily analysts. There’s some old-fashioned violence, and a couple of action scenes, but Older is very clear that our heroes spend a huge amount of their time bent over screens, and they are all very competent at their jobs, and while we never get too deep into the number-crunching aspect of what they do, the narrative never loses sight of it either.

A few months ago I read and wrote about Infomocracy, and I am embarrassed to re-read that post now, as what I didn’t think worth mentioning then is exactly what becomes important in the subsequent book. “Imagine there’s no countries,” I said in my flippant way, but I shouldn’t have, as the world of The Centenal Cycle still has some traditional countries. Saudi Arabia’s one, as we learn in the first book. We see in the second book that Switzerland’s another. And there’s still a rump Chinese state, with its capital at Xi’an. And there are still nation-states in Central Asia -- Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have gotten into a shooting war that threatens to spiral out of control and drag surrounding centenals in.

These are the null states of the title. At least, that’s how Information sometimes refers to them, a bit snarkily. In my review of Infomocracy, I called Information “an independent entity that has apparently replaced the news media”. That’s not wrong, but it’s also much more than that.

The people of this world are so connected that we humans of the 2010s look ridiculous by comparison, with our clumsy, clunky “smartphones” and other “gadgets”. These people are plugged into the online world to such a degree that it borders on telepathy, as they wear miniaturized computers 24/7 that they can control with eyeball movements and they tap out messages with their fingers onto virtual keyboards. AI has become good enough to understand real-time speech with all the nuance, and honest-to-goodness universal translators that actually work well are now standard.

And they are constantly plugged into Information. Reading something -- anything -- in the “real” world? If you like, Information will helpfully annotate it with explainers, context, and fact-checking. Need video of something that happened in a public place? Fortunately, we’re all under constant Information surveillance. This is why the surviving old-timey states are nicknamed null states -- Information doesn’t have its usual level of sophisticated data on them.

This is likely to sound horribly dystopian to many of us, but we readers aren’t being pushed to see it as such. Older never insists that this world should be seen as a dystopia. All of the viewpoint characters are so accustomed to Information and this hyper-connectivity that they see it as the natural order of things, and so we readers will find ourselves doing so as well.

Within the narrative there are “outsider” characters who resist Information’s panopticon world, vindicating those readers who see it as nightmarish. For instance, there’s one very small government in this world that has ideological objections to Information surveillance, and one of its citizens is a minor character who gives her land’s point of view a voice. I can think of many ways the Centenal system is better than what we’ve got right now, and many arguments why Information as presented here is a positive thing. And yet, the downsides are real, not least the potential for malfeasance. Bad people can exploit this system in so many new and ingenious ways.

As I noted in my review of the first book, Older never delves into how we got from our world to the Centenal system, and I think it's wise of her to present this world to us readers as a fait accompli. If I were to speculate, I suspect some elites might be receptive to such a radical re-organization of political power as long as they’d continue to be the elites under the new system, but they’d have to be spooked into doing so under threat of chaos and violence and annihilation. Older does make a brief fleeting reference to large-scale wars that took place in the final years of the pre-Centenal system -- and so I wonder if there are bustling cities in our universe that our globe-trotting heroes in the Centenal Cycle never visit because they are now radioactive rubble.

I read Null States shortly before the local elections here in Taiwan, and so I naturally pondered what sort of government I’d be living under in this universe. I imagine there’d be some sort of patriotic Formosa government, but as I live in a politically very “blue” area of Taipei, they probably wouldn’t win my centenal. There’s a good chance my area would go for the global technocrats of Policy1st, but I could also see the center-right Heritage government doing very well here, at least before they sank under scandals at the end of Infomocracy. (The Heritage-built Tokyo-Taipei tunnel in that book implies they had a presence here.) Or the commercially-oriented Chinese-dominated government called 888 would also be a strong possibility. They wouldn’t be my first choice, but I would deal with it. On the other hand, if my centenal elected 1China, I would be very unhappy. Actually, I’m very curious how cross-strait relations have evolved in this universe.

Oryx and Crake

Oryx and Crake

by Margaret Atwood, 2003

Grim end-of-civilization fiction.

Our protagonist Jimmy grows up in a world, a few decades hence, where the super-rich live and work in vast corporate-owned gated communities and everyone else lives in the world outside. Jimmy’s dad has a sweet corporate job working in the lucrative and rapidly developing field of genetically modified organisms, and Jimmy’s childhood friend Crake turns out to be a budding genius in this field.

But we know from the start that everything’s doomed. Chapters that describe Jimmy’s childhood alternate with chapters about Jimmy’s later life. Civilization has collapsed and nearly all humans are dead. Jimmy lives near a settlement of people called Crakers, genetically modified humanoids who live an Edenic existence, pure and innocent and ignorant of all trappings of civilization. They call Jimmy “Snowman”. Crakers are the creation of Jimmy/Snowman’s old buddy Crake.

Oryx and Crake describes how we get from point A (Jimmy and Crake’s childhood) to point B (planetwide apocalypse).

This is Margaret Atwood at her most science fictiony. I know Atwood pushes back against calling her books ‘science fiction’. Frankly, I see that as a cynical attempt to not get pigeonholed into what she sees as a literary ghetto, and since I’m not her literary agent I can call her book what it obviously is all I want.

In this sci-fi world (oooh, I’m calling it not just ‘science fiction’ but ‘sci-fi’), humans are reshaping the animal and plant kingdoms: “chicken” meat that grows on tree-like organisms; porcine creatures called “pigoons” with human-like physiology, perfect for growing transplantable organs. This tampering with nature, as we can surmise early on, eventually helps lead to the collapse of human civilization.

I’m sure some see this as a grim warning of the dangers of genetically modified organisms, while others see it hysterical anti-GMO alarmism. Personally, I don’t think the biotech of Oryx and Crake necessarily needs to be interpreted in either of these ways. Atwood is clearly fascinated by this technology, and she’s engaging in the time-honored science-fictional tradition of extrapolation. People who choose to read it as a big unsubtle moralistic message about GMOs are, of course, free to take it in whatever way they want; I choose to read it differently.

I haven’t mentioned the enigmatic Oryx (half the title!), because she’s weird and I’m still not sure how to think about her character. Keeping this spoiler-free, I can say that it’s hard for me to get into her head, and if Oryx and Crake were written by a generic male author rather than by the great Margaret Atwood, he’d be mocked over how he wrote the novel’s most prominent female character.

But my wife has advised me that Atwood is playing a long game here, and I should read the remainder of the MadAddam trilogy before rushing to judgement on Oryx. OK, that’s fair.

Oryx and Crake is a self-contained story, but it ends on something of a cliffhanger, and I’m genuinely interested in what happens next. We have the second book in the trilogy on our bookshelves -- I’m interested to see how The Year of the Flood expands on this universe.