2084: 100 Years Since 1984

Who doesn't love a good apocalypse story? I read Stephen King's The Stand when I was fifteen and loved the descriptions of a world in chaos, and what people do when everything they know and depend on is crashing down. Reeling with teen angst, I had elaborate fantasies of being the last person left on earth, roaming through stores and smashing bottles off the shelves, zooming down empty streets on a motorcycle and no one to telling me what to do.

Some see the end of society as a good thing, like David Byrne in his song (Nothing But) Flowers: "Once there were parking lots/Now it's a peaceful oasis...This was a Pizza Hut/ Now it's all covered with daisies...We used to microwave/ Now we just eat nuts and berries"
Or the guy in Twelve Monkeys who decided that humans are jerks and it's best to do away with them and leave the animals to take over.

It seems that the most popular cause of human extinction is the pandemic, in most cases manufactured by one of our own. Margaret Atwood's novel Oryx and Crake is no different. It is a satire on our culture set in the unspecified future, though I would guess fifty or so years from now. There is a distinct divide between cities and the "compounds" which are like the gated communities of the future- walled off, guarded, and sterile replicas of life in the 1950's. There, scientists are working on new and interesting inventions, like pigs genetically modified to produce numerous kidneys for humans and new skins for plastic surgery procedures. Crake, a friend of the main character is one of these scientists, fabricating new animals and plants in a godlike fashion. Jimmy, the main character, is constantly asking, "Yes, but is it real?" To which Crake replies, "What is real? It's here in front of you, isn't it? How it came to be is not important."

This is a question I often grapple with. I tend to be suspicious to the point of paranoid when it comes to things that have been tampered with by people, always preferring the most "natural" version. I admit, this in itself is a dogma, since things always must change and some changes are for the better. What really worries me is rearranging the make up of something on the molecular level. I'll eat a seedless watermelon, even though it's seedlessness is a result of human tampering. But I don't like the thought of eating a tomato that has been genetically enhanced with vitamins or pesticides. It freaks me out that vegetable seeds are now patented, and are designed to be paired with a patented pesticide.

I don't trust humans to consider consequences and act with the whole of society and the natural world in mind. It seems like people will often invent some new technology out of pure curiosity (what will happen if we try to grow a human ear on the back of a mouse?), and then have to come up with some use for it to justify its existence. Any time you mess with the natural world you're going to have an imbalance.

Take forests for example. Forests are really cool the way they have a natural cycle- old trees die, fall over, act as a nutrient bed for new trees to grow, canopy and ground layer creating moist, dark floor for ferns, fungus, slugs and other things to live, also creating protection against erosion. Every so often lightning strikes a tree, resulting in forest fire, clearing out some of the clutter and making way for new life. Nice little system. Then you got people coming in and clear cutting the whole area- no trees, no ecosystem, lots of erosion and mudslides, forest animals die, river animals die. Then people say, oh well if we plant more trees it's fine. So they plant a whole forestful of the same tree at the same time, and then you have a tree farm with no natural cycle. Sighhh. Don't even get me started on cloning.

Margaret Atwood has the same message: "Ya'll are crazy, just quit it with the frankenstein crap or we'll all lose what makes us human and maybe even lose the human race." There must be a lot of people with the same fear because this is a common theme in many books and movies these days: our own technology getting out of control and turning on us. This book was gratifying to read and also terrifying. At some points I wondered if maybe her version of the future wasn't a tad outlandish, then I remembered what people are coming up with in the present and realized she's actually being pretty realistic. Highly recommended read.