Oryx and Crake

Can't remember when I read this.

I have a strong memory of the two kids looking at stuff on the Internet somewhere at the start of it. Completely desensitised to horrors happening elsewhere, behind a screen.

• Author:: [[Margaret Atwood]]
• Full Title:: Oryx and Crake
• Category:: [[books]]

• Highlights first synced by [[readwise]] [[September 2nd, 2020]]

  • a gift that would not be a gift but some tool or intelligence-enhancing game or other hidden demand that he measure up. (Location 590)
  • EXTINCTATHON, Monitored by MaddAddam. Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones. Do you want to play? (Location 1080)
  • When they weren’t playing games they’d surf the Net – drop in on old favourites, see what was new. They’d watch open-heart surgery in live time, or else the Noodie News, which was good for a few minutes because the people on it tried to pretend there was nothing unusual going on and studiously avoided looking at one another’s jujubes. Or they’d watch animal snuff sites, Felicia’s Frog Squash and the like, though these quickly grew repetitious: one stomped frog, one cat being torn apart by hand, was much like another. Or they’d watch dirtysockpuppets.com, a current-affairs show about world political leaders. Crake said that with digital genalteration you couldn’t tell whether any of these generals and whatnot existed any more, and if they did, whether they’d actually said what you’d heard. (Location 1101)
  • Or they might watch hedsoff.com, which played live coverage of executions in Asia. There they could see enemies of the people being topped with swords in someplace that looked like China, while thousands of spectators cheered. Or they could watch alibooboo.com, with various supposed thieves having their hands cut off and adulterers and lipstick-wearers being stoned to death by howling crowds, in dusty enclaves that purported to be in fundamentalist countries in the Middle East. (Location 1109)
  • Better than these were the American sites, with their sports-event commentary (Location 1116)
  • Then a rundown of the crimes, with grisly pictures of the victims. These sites would have spot commercials, for things like car batteries and tranquilizers, and logos painted in bright yellow on the background walls. (Location 1117)
  • Shortcircuit.com, brainfrizz.com, and deathrowlive.com were the best; they showed electrocutions and lethal injections. Once they’d made real-time coverage legal, the guys being executed had started hamming it up for the cameras. (Location 1120)
  • There was an assisted-suicide site too – nitee-nite.com, it was called – which had a this-was-your-life component: (Location 1134)
  • The assisted-suicide statistics shot way up after this show got going. (Location 1137)
  • Or they would watch At Home With Anna K. Anna K. was a self-styled installation artist with big boobs who’d wired up her apartment so that every moment of her life was sent out live to millions of voyeurs. (Location 1145)
  • Or they would watch the Queek Geek Show, which had contests featuring the eating of live animals and birds, timed by stopwatches, (Location 1160)
  • Or they would watch porn shows. There were a lot of those. (Location 1162)
  • Then they went to HottTotts, a global sex-trotting site. “The next best thing to being there,” was how it was advertised. It claimed to show real sex tourists, filmed while doing things they’d be put in jail for back in their home countries. Their faces weren’t visible, their names weren’t used, but the possibilities for blackmail, Snowman realizes now, must have been extensive. The locations were supposed to be countries where life was cheap and kids were plentiful, and where you could buy anything you wanted. (Location 1216)
  • Actually she laid two eggs: one full of animals and birds and fish, and the other one full of words. But the egg full of words hatched first, and the Children of Crake had already been created by then, and they’d eaten up all the words because they were hungry, and so there were no words left over when the second egg hatched out. And that is why the animals can’t talk. (Location 1290)
  • Toast cannot be explained by any rational means. Toast is me. I am toast. (Location 1329)
  • Homo sapiens doesn’t seem able to cut himself off at the supply end. He’s one of the few species that doesn’t limit reproduction in the face of dwindling resources. In other words – and up to a point, of course – the less we eat, the more we fuck.” (Location 1629)
  • “How do you account for that?” said Jimmy. “Imagination,” said Crake. “Men can imagine their own deaths, they can see them coming, and the mere thought of impending death acts like an aphrodisiac. A dog or a rabbit doesn’t behave like that. Take birds – in a lean season they cut down on the eggs, or they won’t mate at all. They put their energy into staying alive themselves until times get better. But human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else, some new version of themselves, and live on forever.” “As a species we’re doomed by hope, then?” “You could call it hope. That, or desperation.” (Location 1632)
  • Crake thought he’d done away with all that, eliminated what he called the G-spot in the brain. God is a cluster of neurons, he’d maintained. (Location 2195)
  • Snowman. No more prostitution, no sexual abuse of children, no haggling over the price, no pimps, no sex slaves. No more rape. The five of them will roister for hours, three of the men standing guard and doing the singing and shouting while the fourth one copulates, turn and turn about. Crake has equipped these women with ultra-strong vulvas – extra skin layers, extra muscles – so they can sustain these marathons. It no longer matters who the father of the inevitable child may be, since there’s no more property to inherit, no father-son loyalty required for war. Sex is no longer a mysterious rite, viewed with ambivalence or downright loathing, conducted in the dark and inspiring suicides and murders. Now it’s more like an athletic demonstration, a free-spirited romp. (Location 2322)
  • on a warm humid day in early February. (Location 2403)
  • God Is Green (Location 2508)
  • Ars Longa Vita Brevis. (Location 2638)
  • Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state, according to him. In addition it was humiliating, because it put you at a disadvantage, it gave the love object too much power. (Location 2712)
  • “I thought you didn’t believe in God,” said Jimmy. “I don’t believe in Nature either,” said Crake. (Location 2939)
  • Adam named the animals. MaddAddam customizes them. (Location 3085)
  • The buildings that didn’t burn or explode are still standing, though the botany is thrusting itself through every crack. Given time it will fissure the asphalt, topple the walls, push aside the roofs. Some kind of vine is growing everywhere, draping the windowsills, climbing in through the broken windows and up the bars and grillwork. Soon this district will be a thick tangle of vegetation. If he’d postponed the trip much longer the way back would have become impassable. It won’t be long before all visible traces of human habitation will be gone. (Location 3149)
  • For a while it was sports coaches and little boys; then there was a wave of adolescent girls found locked in garages. (Location 3612)
  • Now he found himself wincing away. The smallest setbacks were major – a lost sock, a jammed electric toothbrush. Even the sunrise was blinding. He was being rubbed all over with sandpaper. (Location 3710)
  • that he’s forgotten about the cut on his foot. (Location 3881)
    • Note: when didd that happeen???
  • eliminate the external causes of death and you were halfway there. (Location 4151)
  • “External causes?” said Jimmy. “War, which is to say misplaced sexual energy, which we consider to be a larger factor than the economic, racial, and religious causes often cited. Contagious diseases, especially sexually transmitted ones. Overpopulation, leading – as we’ve seen in spades – to environmental degradation and poor nutrition.” (Location 4152)
  • The BlyssPluss Pill would also act as a sure-fire one-time-does-it-all birth-control pill, for male and female alike, thus automatically lowering the population level. (Location 4171)
  • Of course the crank religions wouldn’t like it, in view of the fact that their raison d’être was based on misery, indefinitely deferred gratification, and sexual frustration, but they wouldn’t be able to hold out long. (Location 4199)
  • What you’re looking at is MaddAddam, the cream of the crop.” (Location 4237)
  • What had been altered was nothing less than the ancient primate brain. Gone were its destructive features, the features responsible for the world’s current illnesses. For instance, racism – or, as they referred to it in Paradice, pseudospeciation – had been eliminated in the model group, merely by switching the bonding mechanism: the Paradice people simply did not register skin colour. Hierarchy could not exist among them, because they lacked the neural complexes that would have created it. Since they were neither hunters nor agriculturalists hungry for land, there was no territoriality: the king-of-the-castle hard-wiring that had plagued humanity had, in them, been unwired. They ate nothing but leaves and grass and roots and a berry or two; thus their foods were plentiful and always available. Their sexuality was not a constant torment to them, not a cloud of turbulent hormones: they came into heat at regular intervals, as did most mammals other than man. (Location 4334)