And then it just turned up in one of our local Little Free 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 called Naked News actually exists in our present reality. Although they seem to be wearing bikinis in the episodes on YouTube. I feel like there is a completely starkers show out there, having seen the people who do it as charter guests on Below Deck.
If you are interested in more Atwood, I think ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is amazing. It has become an industry and a cliche now, but don’t let that put you off: the original novel is still incredibly powerful.
ReplyDeleteLike all sci-fi, including the Pohl and Kornbluth you mention, it works both as a vision of the future and as a historical novel about the time when it was written, in this case North America in the age of Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority.
I do want to read it, although slightly feel like I know too much of the plot, from having seen the movie and then watched the first series of the TV show.
DeleteYes the Pohl and Kornbluth is totally a Fifties satire - especially The Space Merchants, where there is a Green Scare not a Red Scare - the Consies (short for Conservationists) are the equivalent to Commies, seditious criticizers of overpopulation and hyper-consumption. So inadvertently predictive of Greenpeace and such like. And then all the stuff about ad agencies is responding to Madison Avenue explosion that would be dramatized in Madmen. I can't remember if The Space Merchants came before or after Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders, his non-fiction expose of the advertising world that I also read avidly as a boy, unaware that it had been written at least a decade if not more earlier and so already out of date. It had stuff about subliminal advertising at the cinema, images of products that flash for a millisecond during the film that supposedly would make cinemagoers crave fizzy soda or sugary treats and rush out during the intermission.
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ReplyDeleteThose little libraries do exist in the UK (at least in the more gentrified areas of London that I inhabit). In rural parts, you're more likely to encounter an old phone box or even a bus stop that has been converted into a book repository. Some train stations also.
ReplyDeleteSounds delightful!
DeleteIn one village near my mum, the old fashioned phone box had been converted to contain an emergency defibrillator - i suppose testifying to the aging population of the place.
I just had a milder experience of a jarring word in a novel. I'm currently reading A Game of Thrones, having never seen any of the show (fantasy is really not my pleasure; it's just that the book is coming up on a literary podcast I'm following). I'm enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would, but occasionally George R.R. Martin uses the word "butt" to mean buttocks. Nowadays it feels such an Americanism on the tongue, but of course the irony is that it's a solidly Middle English term which ought to sound medieval.
ReplyDeleteSupermarkets in the UK oft have book exchanges. I left a load of old books in Tesco today.
I read ‘Cat’s Eye’ around 1990 but I was probably too young to get the themes and with no internet then you couldn’t look up anything about it.
ReplyDelete