A Wombat’s Anus

 So I was feeling like it was time to read a Margaret Atwood and I fancied reading Oryx and Crake, having been intrigued by a chapter on it in Mark Fisher’s The Weird and The Eerie. And then it just turned up in one of our local Little Libraries (a phenomenon of suburban America…. I’ve never seen them in the U.K.). 

I’m reading it and thinking, “well, okay,  this is a bit eerie”.  

And then suddenly on Page 175, I read this sentence:

“Not that his real mother would have given a wombat’s anus, thought Jimmy”.

Now that had really blown it, I felt, in terms of an atmosphere of eerie.  That’s like something you’d expect to read in, I dunno, a Bruce Dickinson novel.  

Actually what it resembles is the colourful invective from the Australian female cop in  Deadloch. 

I read on and then  I started to notice how there’s an awful lot of near-future brand names and corporations and such like. Snacks like AnooYoo bars. Walk-in cosmetic surgery SnipNFix and NooSkins.  Ersatz beverages like Happicuppa.  Big pharma corporations like HelthWyzer. Takeaway treats like SoyOBoy Burgers. GMO fast foods like ChickiNobs Bucket O’Nubbins.

This is all very much reminding me of the s.f. I read as a kid, things like Frederick Pohl + CM Kornbluth’s novels Gladiator-At-Law and The Space Merchants. Anti-capitalist satires set in the near-future, written together by two members of a group of Socialist and Communist science fiction writers who called themselves The Futurians. I read those books in the mid-1970s but they were actually written in the 1950s.  I loved them, have reread them many times over the years, and still reckon they are among the best s.f. ever written. But there’s absolutely nothing “weird or eerie” about either book. It’s a form of speculative but realistic fiction that K-Punk didn’t have much interest in - not uncanny enough.

ChickiNobs is actually rather close – as a genetic-engineered form of industrialized agriculture – to Chicken Little in The Space Merchants. Here the protagonist, a high-flying copywriter in one of the ad agencies that rules the world, is plunged down the class ladder and finds himself toiling as a prole, slicing off filets of flesh from a giant ever-growing and insensate chicken-monster.

Then there are the pleebands: in Atwood’s novel, this is where the ordinary people live, the ones who don’t have cushy jobs and deluxe accommodation in the corporate compounds like HelthWyzer, which are like future-fortress versions of the gated community crossed with the tech-bro Freedom City fantasy. These pleeblands (pleb lands, get it?) quite resemble where the proles of Gladiator-At-Law live, which are suburban precincts once advertised as dream homes but which have degenerated into ghettos through neglect. In Gladiator-At-Law, the executive class live in the new dream homes: hi-tech houses that anticipate your every need.

So I’m reading on, my doubts growing. Enjoying the novel -  the world of Oryx and Crake is cleverly imagined, the book’s structure is narratively inventive, the plot pacy and gripping -  but I’m also like, “when is the promised eeriness going to show up?”.

Well, after a bit, despite my fear of spoilers, I sneak a peek at the relevant chapter in The Weird and The Eerie. Turns out it was a completely different Atwood novel that Mark wrote about: Surfacing. Which does sound pretty fucking eerie. Oryx and Crake is mentioned, but only in passing. The title of the book is so odd that it must have stuck in my head, where Surfacing didn’t. 

I finished Oryx and Crake and despite the slight lingering feeling of being jipped (the byproduct of my own misconception of course) I consider it to be time well spent. 

However, I then realized it’s just part one of a trilogy – the MaddAddam trilogy. I don’t think I have the heart for it, honestly.  

One thing about Oryx and Crake – which was written in the early 2000s – is that it does correctly predict certain trends to do with the development of videogames, the internet and mass media. There is for instance a channel called Noodie News where you can watch the news read out by naked newsreaders. Something like that actually exists in our present reality.