Overflowing with new perspectives on colonization, attempts to Christianize indigenous American populations, slavery & new world economies, all tied tOverflowing with new perspectives on colonization, attempts to Christianize indigenous American populations, slavery & new world economies, all tied to the Columbian exchange of goods, people, and diseases There is so much worth discussing about this very fascinating book, but lately I don't have the time or energy to do it any justice as I would have in my reviews from years past. So suffice to say that is an excellent companion piece to his book 1491 on the pre-Columbia native peoples and cultures of the Americas. If more Europeans knew the very problematic behavior of their ancestors in the New World, they would be far less quick to assume cultural or moral superiority. History is a messy and bloody business, but nobody is innocent of past wrongs. The best thing is to be aware of those transgressions, acknowledge them, and vow not to repeat the mistakes of the past....more
A scathing condemnation of the world we are creating Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Oryx and Crake hit me a lot harder than I expected. It’s MaA scathing condemnation of the world we are creating Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Oryx and Crake hit me a lot harder than I expected. It’s Margaret Atwood, so you can expect the deft characterizations, innovative narrative structure, effortless writing, and social criticism. What I wasn’t prepared for was the powerful emotional impact it had, and the thoughts it generated. In essence, Atwood asks a simple question: “What type of world are we creating, and does it deserve to exist? Moreover, do we deserve to exist if we stay on the path we are heedlessly pursuing?” This is not a new question. Plenty of dystopian and post-apocalyptic novels have asked it in a variety of forms. But for my money, Oryx and Crake is one of the most eloquent and harsh condemnations of the world we have created, whether intentionally or not, that I’ve read in the last few years.
It has elements of Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos and Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, and I imagine some overlap with Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (which I plan to read soon), but it is a distinctive work with an unmistakable message. The story is about Snowman, the last human survival of a global biotech-induced plague that has wiped out humanity, the Crakers, a group of genetically modified herbivorous childlike-humans that have been designed to survive in this new world, Crake, the brilliant geneticist who has passed judgment on humanity and found it unworthy, and Oryx, a young Asian former child-prostitute who is involved with both Snowman and Crake.
It is about a near future dominated by corporations that maintain carefully-guarded communities for their sheltered employees, and the rest of the population that live in pleeblands. Governments, armies, universities, security – everything has been privatized, as so many free-market proponents tell us would benefit us all. I wonder how many of those intellectuals, economists, professors, and social innovators live as the have-nots of the world do, on the fringes of our global economy. My guess – none at all. I myself work for a giant securities company that is built on the premise that the efficient use of capital leads to greater economic benefits for all members of society, and the fewer government restrictions, the better. So the irony of this message invariably coming from the privileged class is not lost on me, I can assure you.
The story is also about the online world we have created for ourselves, and with just the slightest bit of exaggerations, shows us the childhood of Snowman and Crake, growing up on a steady diet of online public executions, 24/7 webcams, Noodie News, assisted suicide, frog squashing, snuff videos, hard-core porn, and child pornography. It’s all just standard stuff for kids in the future. Looking all the content that the Internet offers without any restrictions to anyone with a smartphone, including kids of all ages, I think any parent out there can share my discomfort and fears about what this unrestricted flow of information can do to young minds not prepared to draw distinctions between what we still attempt to categorize as “good” and “bad”, “moral” and “immoral”, “healthy” and “harmful”. Who is it that decides? Well, nobody unfortunately.
Nobody wants the censored internet of China, but what price do we pay, particularly children, for the unfettered freedom of the Kardashians, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. I certainly have found much good in social media and endless information at my fingertips, but that’s because I grew up in the pre-Internet age when I first developed interests and ideas without the ubiquitous influence of social media. How would I and my peers have fared with non-stop free entertainment on the web? Would I have ever bothered to delve into lengthy novels for hours on end, or would I go for the instant gratification of Tweets, YouTube, Google, and the like? It’s such a slippery slope, and the same question applies: “Do guns kill people, or people kill people? Does the internet kill meaningful thought and reflection, or does it depend on the user?” It’s just a tool, after all, say proponents of the Internet. But when I see people’s fingers twitching on their mobile phones the instant they have a free moment, and the sea of bowed heads staring at their little private digital worlds (and my head among them), I have to wonder, is this the world we want for ourselves? It’s not as if going back to a simple agrarian existence is even a remote possibility in our massively-interlinked global society. 99.9% of us would be dead within a week without the global economic infrastructure, and if we did survive it would be about as pleasant the The Walking Dead.
So when the brilliant scientist Crake engineers a supervirus to wipe out humanity for its sins, his judgment is cold and harsh. To paraphrase, his view is “The world we have created is evil, and we cannot expect to solve our own problems. Therefore, I will annihilate humanity and create a new, simpler, and more innocent species to carry on in the post-human world.” That’s much the same idea as Vonnegut’s Galapagos, thought that book has a much whimsical tone to mask the harsh message beneath. And so every reader of Oryx and Crake has to ask themselves that question. Atwood doesn’t let us squirm away. Oftentimes post-apocalyptic tales are cautionary in nature, and warn us to step away from the path we are going down in terms of environmental destruction, overpopulation, religious intolerance, overreliance on technology, tinkering with genetics, etc. And certainly Oryx and Crake is about that. Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven is a gentle and elegant hymn to the good and beautiful aspects of our world that we take for granted, and that is a valid view as well.
But Oryx and Crake is no gentle fable. The future world it depicts has basically nothing worthy of redemption at all. The privileged corporate workers in their guarded compounds live a cynical and willfully ignorant existence, knowing their activities are built upon exploiting the plebes outside. The plebes for their part live a brutish existence lacking in appeal. Snowman is closer to the reader’s perspective as he observes with horror what Crake has planned for humanity. And Oryx is an oddball – a young girl subjected to the worst that developing world poverty can dish out, and yet having a beutific and serene outlook on life that chooses to focus on the good and ignore the ugliness. But ignoring it doesn’t make it go away. Instead, Crake takes it into his own hands to pass judgment and ruthlessly exterminate humanity. He takes action, but what a cruel and final sentence. We, humanity, are not given any chance for redemption or even rebuttal. I hardly think Atwood is suggesting that his act is justified or right, but she also doesn’t shy away from putting our world on trial and letting us think about our own answers. It’s a very intense experience and I can’t imagine any reader who doesn’t finish the book without stopping for a long time, maybe even days later, to think about the implications. Amazing, wonderful, and terrifying all at once. I’m tempted to read it again right now, but I need to move on. I’ll definitely revisit it again someday.
I’m fully aware that Oryx and Crake is the first part of the MADDADDAM TRILOGY, but I’m reluctant to proceed to The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam. That’s because I’ve read dozens of reviews of both, many from friends whose judgment I trust. And what I’ve gathered is this: The Year of the Flood explores much of the same territory of Oryx and Crake and fills in many details of the world and relationships there. And while some people say this book is just as good as the first one, many said they prefer Oryx and Crake where all the ideas and characters are new, and said the second book is well written but lacks the impact of the original. The reviews of MaddAddam are even more mixed, with a lot of people seriously disappointed in comparison to the first and second books. Because I was so impressed by Oryx and Crake, I don’t want to ruin that feeling, so if anything I’d rather re-read it instead. Or I may read The Year of the Flood someday to learn more, and skip the final book. We’ll see....more
The Windup Girl: Great world-building, but really unpleasant characters Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Having swept the Hugo, Nebula, and LocusThe Windup Girl: Great world-building, but really unpleasant characters Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Having swept the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards in 2010, this book should have been a slam-dunk for me. A dystopian near-future story set in Thailand, in a post-abundance world where genetic diseases have wiped out most staple food crops, rising ocean levels have flooded most coastal cities, and fossil fuels have been completely exhausted. Biotech ‘calorie’ companies hold the world hostage with ‘genehacked’ crops that are rendered sterile to ensure continual demand, but they are constantly battling to stay ahead of ever mutating plagues and diseases like blister rot that decimate crops and keep much of the globe near starvation. Due to the lack of oil, energy sources have been reduced to genetically-engineered ‘megadonts’ (giant elephants), kink springs (batteries that store energy that has been cranked manually), manual labor, etc.
This grim, steampunk near-future world is meticulously depicted by Bacigalupi. He’s clearly done his research on the culture, history, and sights/sounds/smells of Thailand. Behind the polite smiles and gentle demeanors lie more sinister undercurrents. Notably, Thailand continues its proud tradition of independence among the Asian nations. It has weathered all the numerous plagues, famines, wars, etc. that have swept the globe by maintaining strict border controls and more importantly a precious seed bank of disease-resistant crops, thus ensuring food security where other Asian nations have collapsed. This of course does not go over well with the calorie companies, who desperately want access to the seed bank for their own profit. Anderson Lake is a ‘calorie man’ for AgriGen, a cold and calculating economic spy sent to track down the seek bank. He uses a kink-spring factory as his cover. When he encounters a new variety of fruit in the markets, he knows he’s on the right track.
Then he meets Emiko, the ‘windup girl’ of the title. She is a New Person, an artificially grown human in a crèche and genetically modified to serve as a sexual toy for Japanese elites. Faced with an aging population and lack of laborers, the Japanese have engineered these ‘windups’ to serve various functions in society, from manual labor to military models. For some bizarre reason, Emiko’s movements are mechanical, stilted, and herky-jerky. Supposedly this design reflects the various ceremonial duties such as tea ceremony that Emiko’s kind are designed for, but that really didn’t make sense to me. There’s no reason to make artificial humans so imperfect. In any case, Emiko is a sexual plaything for the various unpleasant male characters in the book, and though she supposedly struggles against her genetic design and conditioning to be subservient, she mainly serves as a ‘deus ex machina’ for a key event later in the novel, and I found her character both unconvincing and somewhat offensive. There are plenty of stereotypes of subservient Asian women in popular culture, so I can see the rationale behind extrapolating this to a near-future SF context. Emiko strongly reminded me of Songmi~451 in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, a ‘fabricant’ that serves real humans as a pliant slave in a dystopian future Korean state. However, Songmi becomes a messiah of sorts, while Emiko does not.
This recurrent theme of subservient Asian women really irritates me, but I need look no further than Japanese TV shows, anime, and manga to see the constant barrage of images that encourage Japanese women to be cute, air-headed, fashion-obsessed, and unthreatening to men. Even though the reality is far from that, there’s no denying that Japanese society itself often cultivates this image since it remains a male-dominated society that superficially wants women to be more empowered in society and the workplace but still expects them to fulfill traditional roles of servitude in the home. So while I recognized the reasons why Bacigalupi created the ‘windup girl’ character, I really disliked this choice. Even more, he graphically describes the sexual humiliations that Emiko undergoes in two extended sequences that turned my stomach. Perhaps this was meant to show just how disgusting men are when it comes to dehumanizing women and reducing them to sex objects, but it was over the top and nasty. There’s a fine line between describing evil behavior and just being gratuitous.
Actually, this entire book is filled with unsavory characters like the Somdet Chaopraya, the real power behind the Thai throne; General Pratcha, head of the Environment Ministry and its white-shirt goons who shake down business owners, and Trade Minister Akkarat, who is in bed with various foreigners seeking a foothold in Thailand and is also scheming to overcome Pratcha. There is also Cavanaugh, a businessman who is even more unpleasant than Lake. There is even a sleazy gene-hacker named Gibson who cares more about the challenges of designing new genetic creations and will work for either side. In a world as ruthless and resource-depleted as this, perhaps this is realistic, but everyone is so self-serving, callous, scheming, and mean-spirited that it just wore me down as a reader.
There were only three characters not completely unpleasant. Hock Seng, an older ethnic Chinese man who escaped Islamic extremists in Malaysia, the Green Headbanders, who slaughtered all the Chinese they could find in an orgy or religious fervor (and revenge for economic grudges). Hock Seng lost all his formerly prosperous family in Malaysia, and has been reduced to a subservient position as a supervisor in Anderson Lake’s factory. His goal is to steal plans for a new kink-spring design and somehow revive his decimated clan. I certainly could sympathize with his plight, and saw parallels with how the Nazis seized the property and money of Jews in Europe under the cover of ideology.
The most interesting character is perhaps Captain Jaidee, a former muay thai boxing champion who works for the white-shirts of the Environment Ministry. Although most white-shirts are on the take and look the other way as farang (slang for foreigners) smuggle in contraband, he decides one day to destroy the shipments at the docks to send a message that the Thais are not completely in thrall to foreign powers. While this generates a big groundswell of popularity among the downtrodden, he also angers the vested interests inside the ministry and other powerful enemies. His desire fight corruption is admirable but inevitably doomed to failure. His lieutenant Kanya later makes a fateful decision that will change the fate of Thailand and the various powers vying for control.
The pacing of the book is quite problematic too. It starts fairly briskly, as we see the sweltering, teeming streets of Bangkok and learn how this world works. However, not much happens for the middle 200 pages other than learning lots of details about the unpleasant characters mentioned about, before the plot suddenly leaps into action, leading to a muddled power struggle that eventually erupts in to open civil war between the Trade and Environment ministries. Several ‘deus ex machinas’ are used to arrive at a seeming conclusion, before things are flipped at the end and new possibilities are suggested. The rushed ending and chaotic fighting among various parties reminded me of the last 100 pages of Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age (the steampunk and biotech aspects are also related), and was equally unsatisfying.
Since this was Bacigalupi’s first novel, it would be great if he has polished his craft and learned to combine his excellent world-building with better pacing and more sympathetic characters. However, from the reviews I’ve read of his subsequent YA dystopian books Ship Breaker and The Drowned Cities, as well as his most recent book Water Knife, he seems to prefer uncompromising tales of environmental disaster that serve as dire warnings against the direction we are heading. All very good, but it wouldn’t hurt to make his books a little more reader-friendly. I felt the same way about William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive when I read them 25 years ago. Either way, I plan to tackle two of Gibson’s more recent near-future thrillers Pattern Recognition and The Peripheral at some point, but will have to be prepared for some heavy reading....more
A call to arms to address global warning, population growth, fossil fuels, renewable energy, and the desire of developing countries to achieve first-wA call to arms to address global warning, population growth, fossil fuels, renewable energy, and the desire of developing countries to achieve first-world lifestyles. Told in Friedman's typically earnest, simplistic, and fairly cloying style. Reminds me of a less intelligent Jared Diamond....more
Another excellent book by Jared Diamond that closely examines the relationship between the environment and the success and/or failure of various civilAnother excellent book by Jared Diamond that closely examines the relationship between the environment and the success and/or failure of various civilizations both ancient and modern. This territory was already brilliantly explored in his earlier Guns, Germs & Steel, so in some ways it feels like an addendum to the previous book, simply expanding on the number of case studies in more detail, so it's not as fresh as the previous book. Still, the insights are still there, and the modern-day discussions of Montana and Australia are also illuminating. However, the chapter on China is very underdeveloped, whereas too much time is devoted to Greenland. Overall, highly recommended if a tad overlong....more
"A good primer on how the World Bank and IMF view economic development in emerging nations and how their efforts to promote growth often backfire, and"A good primer on how the World Bank and IMF view economic development in emerging nations and how their efforts to promote growth often backfire, and how the resultant austerity solutions to excessive debt tend to exacerbate the problem and cause further misery. Not sure if countries would be better off without any IMF/WB interference, but clearly they need to reexamine their policies, especially after a number of prominent policy failures. The author actually served as chief economist at the World Bank, so his views carry more weight than usual. Eager to read his follow-up Making Globalization Work."...more
"Presents the now-familiar argument that the benefits of globalization outweigh its demerits. The text is overlong, repetitive and filled with endless"Presents the now-familiar argument that the benefits of globalization outweigh its demerits. The text is overlong, repetitive and filled with endless anecdotes about insightful chats with cab drivers, hotel staff, tech support, etc. Still, it does make a decent case that we are better off embracing globalization and making the best of it than trying to resist it. Just one too many simplistic concepts like the McDonalds' Theory of Conflict Resolution. Worth reading as a counterpoint to books like Stiglitz' Globalization and its Discontents, though Stiglitz is a far more insightful and intelligent thinker and writer."...more
"A follow up to "Globalization and its Discontents", it reiterates the message that the global financial system needs a complete overhaul, including t"A follow up to "Globalization and its Discontents", it reiterates the message that the global financial system needs a complete overhaul, including the IMF, World Bank, trade regimes, bailout methods, monetary reserves, development initiatives, resource ownership, debt burdens of developing countries, etc. A veritable laundry basket of solutions, but I wonder how realistic many of them are."...more
A Game Changer: The First Book of Historical Anthropology that Incorporates Geography, Agriculture, Animal Domestication, and Disease Exposure into OuA Game Changer: The First Book of Historical Anthropology that Incorporates Geography, Agriculture, Animal Domestication, and Disease Exposure into Our Understanding of How Different Cultures and Continents Experienced Differing Rates of Development, and the Dramatic Clashes When Such Cultures Collided This book will demolish your preconceived notions about why some civilizations and peoples have thrived, while others have not. Diamond explores the key role that environments and geography play in shaping different cultures, and the ultimate factors that affect cultures most, like: availability of domesticable plants and animals, shift from hunter-gatherers to farmers, ease of population movement due to geography, north-south vs. east-west axes of the continents, exposure to various animal-born diseases and resultant immunity, development of writing and metal-working, etc. His carefully-laid argument builds a compelling case that many societies have benefited greatly from their environment, and that their success is not necessarily due to an innate superiority. The implication too is that cultures that currently dominate the global scene may not always retain that position if they destroy their environments, an idea that is more fully explored in his next book Collapse.
I first read this book back in 2013 and it really opened my mind to seeing history and cultures and development through the lens of geographical factors. Needless to say one of the fundamental reasons Jared Diamond wrote it was to dispel the centuries-long belief that much of the dominance of advanced Western societies stems from racial/genetic superiority rather than environmental factors. This time I'm revisiting it via audiobook in 2020 with a lot more books of historical anthropology under my belt, and it remains a real powerhouse book of fresh ideas.
That is not to discredit the many discoveries, innovations, and efforts of Western civilization over the millennia, but rather to bring a more balanced view of the world, reminding us of the many early technological innovations that arose in China, the advanced pre-industrial societies of the Americas such as the Aztecs, Incas, and Mayans, the early societies of the Fertile Crescent, and so forth. His arguments are so lucidly developed and well-argued that you might be led to believe that it was only these environmental factors that explain why some cultures thrived and become dominant in the modern world while others did not. This would be inaccurate of course.
There are many "ultimate" factors that supersede the "proximate" factors, such as the focus of industrial Western societies on innovation, technological advancement, rule of law, focus on scientific reasoning over religious dogma, acceptance of cultural and ideological diversity, and the constant drive for growth and expansion spurred by capitalism, whether for good or bad. So there are plenty of nay-sayers that discount much of Diamond's arguments. I think that is missing the point. He is not providing the all-encompassing answers to why some societies thrive while others struggle in the modern world. Rather, he's trying to redress the underlying preconceptions of racial/cultural superiority that have prevailed until now so that we can reassess things from a much balanced perspective. It's the starting point for further analysis of why the world has developed the way it has, and more importantly (as he addresses in more recent books), how we can shape future developments in a more sustainable way given that understanding....more
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