Oryx and Crake part 2
Time for more Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood, who is not the author of Silent Spring. This means I won't have to worry about "ZOMYGODyour4DDT!" Yeah.
Subchapters: OrganInc Farms, Lunch, Nooners
Summary
Today we learn that Jimmy's dad works at OrganInc Farms. The first sentence and we've already touched on the most evil, vile, sinister, society threatening, civilization destroying, kitten killing aspect of biotech firms -- their names. The names of biotech firms are always intentional misspellings, droll puns, or both. Genentech comes to mind. Less flippantly, "OrganInc" looks like a portentous play on "organic", the word appropriated by advocates of natural farming methods to mean "natural." Why not just use "natural" in the first place? My guess is to imply that food grown non-naturally is somehow fake living matter. Evidence supporting my hypothesis is how the omniscient narrator says OrganInc's farms aren't real like in the pictures Jimmy's seen.
There's another unsubtle hint, one I've neglected to mention last time. Margaret--I mean the narrator keeps going on about how Jimmy only saw the natural world through media rather than in person.
What OrganInc (CamelCase is such a pain to type) actually does is make pigoons, which are pigs except with extra organs that can be harvested. Then we snap back to Snowman who bitches about how the concept of being old enough to understand something is stupid, then we flash back to pigoons. Not much more to say really, except that obvious passing reference to (illegally) growing humans for spare parts. Narrator also hinty-hints that pigoons are also served in the cafeteria, which is bad because they have human genes. SOYLENT GREEN IS MADE OUT OF PEEEEEEPOLL!!! OF PEOPLE!!!1! Meg, hon, human genes just make human proteins, they don't make people unless they're in the right sequence. We put human genes in bacteria. All the time. It's how Genetech makes insulin.
Moving on with the third page of this section, Jimmy's dad says something sexist again, and we find out that Jimmy's mom is named Sharon. Dad, who won't get a name for a while, talks with a co-worker about putting Sharon on medication for her depression. More on this later, but Jimmy wants to look at the pigoons.
Jimmy looks at the pigs, oogles the babies, finds the adults scary, at treats us to a paragraph of PETA propaganda on factory farms.
Now Jimmy's thinking about his house. We're practically told that the furniture is fake because it's called "reproduction," the original versions nowhere to be found. He lives in the gated community/company town setting so beloved of hack sci-fi writers, with dangerous cities out of early-90's sci-fi and everything in newspeak -- "the Modules," "the Compounds," "the pleblands," "the CorpSeCorps."
And now we glimpse into Jimmy's domestic life. His mom quit her job for unknown reasons, mopes around, and appears to have borderline personality disorder. Jimmy annoys her whenever possible just to get her to show an emotion. We see her being driven into a fit, and another time when she breaks into tears.
And we're back to Snowman again, hearing voices and feeling sorry for himself. He looks at the genemod animals gone feral, pigoons and rakunks and wolvogs, and thinks back to his childhood again. He thinks back on his nice school teacher, a nice lady who he both loathes and lusts after. He thinks about Crake and the games they played: Extinctathon, Three-Dimensional Waco, Barbarian Stomp, Kwiktime Osama. Yep, Atwood's jumped on that bandwagon.
I hope you won't mind if I go on a tangent for a moment, I promise it's relevant. A while back on the SJG Forums, there was a wee bit'o moral outrage at Super Columbine Massacre. Besides the predictable shock and shuddering, a couple of bozos said It'd be useful for criminology purposes, and one schmuck made a rant about richwhitemales directed at said bozos. Schmuck said that anyone making, and playing, such games were trying to be "superedgyshockcool" by "defending the indefensible." No, it's just to tweak the noses of moralizing assholes like you and Tracy Hickman. Besides, SCMRPG! is freeware, and really just a game as g_pudding and others pointed out.
Now Snowman's thinking about keeping a diary, it's like a blog but on paper and more about personal life than editorializing, but he angsts about how future generations won't be able to read it. No, he doesn't think Crake's master race can ever learn how to read.
While waxing ontologically about a caterpillar, he scolds himself for having a happy thought. The he thinks back to how the teacher in his Life Skills class was all about grim work ethic. The teacher, "a shambling neo-con reject from the heady days of the legendary dot-com bubble," is every part the stereotypical hotshot yuppie -- ponytail, nose stud -- except that he's burned-out and decrepit! Isn't that clever? I can just hear Margaret going haw-ha! as she's writing this.
Snowman mopes some more, feels insecure about his body compared to the Crakers, and goes to sleep.
Subchapters: OrganInc Farms, Lunch, Nooners
Summary
Today we learn that Jimmy's dad works at OrganInc Farms. The first sentence and we've already touched on the most evil, vile, sinister, society threatening, civilization destroying, kitten killing aspect of biotech firms -- their names. The names of biotech firms are always intentional misspellings, droll puns, or both. Genentech comes to mind. Less flippantly, "OrganInc" looks like a portentous play on "organic", the word appropriated by advocates of natural farming methods to mean "natural." Why not just use "natural" in the first place? My guess is to imply that food grown non-naturally is somehow fake living matter. Evidence supporting my hypothesis is how the omniscient narrator says OrganInc's farms aren't real like in the pictures Jimmy's seen.
There's another unsubtle hint, one I've neglected to mention last time. Margaret--I mean the narrator keeps going on about how Jimmy only saw the natural world through media rather than in person.
What OrganInc (CamelCase is such a pain to type) actually does is make pigoons, which are pigs except with extra organs that can be harvested. Then we snap back to Snowman who bitches about how the concept of being old enough to understand something is stupid, then we flash back to pigoons. Not much more to say really, except that obvious passing reference to (illegally) growing humans for spare parts. Narrator also hinty-hints that pigoons are also served in the cafeteria, which is bad because they have human genes. SOYLENT GREEN IS MADE OUT OF PEEEEEEPOLL!!! OF PEOPLE!!!1! Meg, hon, human genes just make human proteins, they don't make people unless they're in the right sequence. We put human genes in bacteria. All the time. It's how Genetech makes insulin.
Moving on with the third page of this section, Jimmy's dad says something sexist again, and we find out that Jimmy's mom is named Sharon. Dad, who won't get a name for a while, talks with a co-worker about putting Sharon on medication for her depression. More on this later, but Jimmy wants to look at the pigoons.
Jimmy looks at the pigs, oogles the babies, finds the adults scary, at treats us to a paragraph of PETA propaganda on factory farms.
Now Jimmy's thinking about his house. We're practically told that the furniture is fake because it's called "reproduction," the original versions nowhere to be found. He lives in the gated community/company town setting so beloved of hack sci-fi writers, with dangerous cities out of early-90's sci-fi and everything in newspeak -- "the Modules," "the Compounds," "the pleblands," "the CorpSeCorps."
And now we glimpse into Jimmy's domestic life. His mom quit her job for unknown reasons, mopes around, and appears to have borderline personality disorder. Jimmy annoys her whenever possible just to get her to show an emotion. We see her being driven into a fit, and another time when she breaks into tears.
And we're back to Snowman again, hearing voices and feeling sorry for himself. He looks at the genemod animals gone feral, pigoons and rakunks and wolvogs, and thinks back to his childhood again. He thinks back on his nice school teacher, a nice lady who he both loathes and lusts after. He thinks about Crake and the games they played: Extinctathon, Three-Dimensional Waco, Barbarian Stomp, Kwiktime Osama. Yep, Atwood's jumped on that bandwagon.
I hope you won't mind if I go on a tangent for a moment, I promise it's relevant. A while back on the SJG Forums, there was a wee bit'o moral outrage at Super Columbine Massacre. Besides the predictable shock and shuddering, a couple of bozos said It'd be useful for criminology purposes, and one schmuck made a rant about richwhitemales directed at said bozos. Schmuck said that anyone making, and playing, such games were trying to be "superedgyshockcool" by "defending the indefensible." No, it's just to tweak the noses of moralizing assholes like you and Tracy Hickman. Besides, SCMRPG! is freeware, and really just a game as g_pudding and others pointed out.
Now Snowman's thinking about keeping a diary, it's like a blog but on paper and more about personal life than editorializing, but he angsts about how future generations won't be able to read it. No, he doesn't think Crake's master race can ever learn how to read.
While waxing ontologically about a caterpillar, he scolds himself for having a happy thought. The he thinks back to how the teacher in his Life Skills class was all about grim work ethic. The teacher, "a shambling neo-con reject from the heady days of the legendary dot-com bubble," is every part the stereotypical hotshot yuppie -- ponytail, nose stud -- except that he's burned-out and decrepit! Isn't that clever? I can just hear Margaret going haw-ha! as she's writing this.
Snowman mopes some more, feels insecure about his body compared to the Crakers, and goes to sleep.