RE: The Children of Crake
In the previous entry we examined some of Snowman’s reflections upon the video games and websites that he (as Jimmy) and Crake frequented for entertainment. Noting both the disturbing content of these sites and the approachability of said content as an extension of extant realities, the ethical background of this setting was called into question. In reading further into Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, we are provided additional clues and insights into the ethical development of the setting from which this dystopia emerged.
The universities are tiered dramatically according to the intellectual aptitude and acuity of their student populations. Snowman describes the process by which these institutions bid, saying “the brainiacs were tussled over by the best EduCompounds and the transcripts of the mediocre were fingered and skimmed and had coffee spilled on them” (174). In contrast to Snowman’s underfunded liberal arts college–which accepted the low-scoring candidates and provided little career opportunity upon graduation–Crake’s university is similar to a contemporary MIT, say, or CalTech, being always on the cutting-edge of experimentation. One means of inspiring their students to critically engage in advances of technologies and sciences is by giving students “half the royalties from anything they invented there” (203).
By following Atwood’s careful descriptions of the intellectual caliber and personality types of students who attend these disparate universities, we come to understand the values of the broader society. Crake’s university is endearingly referred to as “Aspergers U.”–an apt description of its student population, comprised of those who are “Demi-autistic, genetically speaking; single-track tunnel-vision mines, [with] a marked degree of social ineptitude” (193). The processes to which these students are devoted include the “Moses Model” rock that would store water releasable by being hit by a rod, and “large bulblike object[s]” that were in fact “Chicken parts”–surviving engineered creatures hosting twelve parts to a “growth unit” (202). The students at Snowman’s university, however, engage in largely unfunded art projects, such as organizing vultures to feed in choreographed letter-formations.
What we see from these illustrations is the priority of bioengineered entities for social funding as well as a desire to move away from arts of the previous centuries. Snowman, for example, gets a summer job selecting old mildewed books to burn and choosing which to archive in the computer system. The primary interest of the institutions and the capital is wrested control over biology, made possible by the type of intellect that lacks interest in ethical fundamentals of previous centuries. Jimmy’s response to the chicken creature, for example, is an excellent means of understanding the lack of value placed on natural evolution by those with funding: when he asks what the creature thinks, a woman laughs at him, explaining “they’d removed all the brain functions that had nothing to do with digestion, assimilation, and growth” (203). These, among other illustrations, are helping us develop an understanding of the ethical environment, but we await further descriptions of the plagues and battles that brought this setting to an end and ushered in the Children of Crake.
