"This austere skepticism is not so much balanced as complicated by a giddy submission to the mystical."

. . . A true, perfect history of mankind lies elsewhere, inaccessible to man as long as he is led along by his corrupt eyes, touch, hearing, taste, and sense of smell, but perceptible perhaps to the undisturbed motion of the soul. ("Tenebrian Chronicles")

- Not so outré as all that. Didn't Plato say as much? And what of sensible John Locke? Surely it is naïve to believe that the senses are reliable interpreters of all reality. The senses don't see gravity, or electricity or intelligence, and yet we believe these things exist. ("The Parlour Game")

Paul Glennon is a Canadian author who works in the software industry. He is currently writing a trilogy for children called Bookweirder about a young boy who enters the world of books and has to piece plots back together.

According to Glennon's Afterward, the idea for The Dodecahedron, or A Frame for Frames grew from his thoughts about the "geometry of short story collections." In most cases, he observed, the stories follow a continuity similar to that of the novel, progressing through a series of developments until a resolution in the final story. Instead of this "cyclical" geometry, Glennon wanted to produce a unified collection where each story could nevertheless stand on its own and linear order was irrelevant. He also looked to the Oulipo principles that guided another one of our reads, Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual, and set A Frame for Frames within certain constraints based on the geometry of the twelve-sided dodecahedron. Each of the twelve stories represents one of the dodecahedron's faces, which are pentagonal. These five sides in turn stand for the relationships between the stories: each one must refer to or be referred to by each of the five stories adjacent to it. And so the book's shifting perspectives and all-out Mind Screw were born.

A Frame for Frames is difficult to describe without spoilers. Common themes include an ancient Vatican conspiracy to hide the New World, messages in bottles, the Arctic, the production of fiction by machines or artificial intelligence, the philosophical notion of transcendent paragons (or "types"), and variations on the tale of Scheherazade. Several genres are present in addition to the standard short story, including fantasy, memoir, the children's story, the magazine article, academic paper, adventure fiction, and what seems to be the opening chapter to a novel. Regardless of the order in which you read, the collection as a whole unfolds like endlessly deconstructing origami. The stories both contradict and reinforce one another in a disorienting flux that leaves reality itself in doubt with the faint image of the underlying dodecahedron as the only point of stability. In the self-contained universe of the The Dodecahedron, it is the symbol of ultimate reality - that spiritual truth glimpsed at by monks in the prolonged Arctic night or a casual conversation about said monks at a modern cocktail party. But wait - are the Tenebrian manuscripts just a hoax???

The Dodecahedron, or A Frame for Frames is a constant surprise and one of the most marvelous books we've ever read. The stories themselves are individually gripping in their own ways and the concepts they introduce are delicious food for thought. I would like to thank Sarah for choosing this one and look forward to the responses of the other Wolves.

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Paul Glennon's The Dodecahedron, or A Frame for Frames was The Wolves' reading selection for April. Please feel free to join us for the rest! You can find the complete book list here.

An Evening with Margaret Atwood

The town where I live is home to a small liberal arts college with a big reputation. Last week, a friend of mine who works there informed me that Margaret Atwood was scheduled to give a lecture and sign books! Naturally, I was very excited about this. I did see Salman Rushdie and Umberto Ecco onstage together during my own university years. To this day, however, I could not tell you what they talked about. Hard to believe that two such renown authors can be so dull, but it's true. The only thing I remember is someone's cell phone going off while Ecco was reading a passage from his new book.

(I've never read Ecco. Bad book blogger, bad!)

So I went last night with my hardcover copy of Oryx and Crake, the only Atwood novel I've read so far although I hope to remedy this situation as soon as possible. The event was held in the campus chapel, a surprisingly cozy space yet equipped with two large balconies enabling it to hold a good-sized audience. Atwood was introduced by a Canadian creative writing professor, who joked about her countrymen's penchant for understatement and self-depreciating humor. Although Atwood's primary subject was Frequently Asked Questions she receives, she picked up on this particular topic as well. Her favorite Canadian joke: "What does a Canadian woman say when you ask her for sex? 'Okay. But only if you're having some too.'"

After warning us that Canadians were infiltrating our town, Atwood then brought up her Twitter activities, which have lately included searching for a new Vancouver Olympics slogan. Atwood said she was inspired to do this after a fellow Canadian expressed his concern to her that "Own the podium!" was just too bold for Canada. Her favorites suggestions included:

"Rent the podium!"
"A podium? For me?"
"Sorry, do you mind if we try out the podium this time?"
"Perhaps a bronze?"
"Occasionally borrowing the podium."
"Please don't bother. I'll just sit under the podium."
"I'll have that podium if it's all right with you, eh?"
"A podium might be nice."

I actually ended up learning quite a bit about Canada during the half-hour talk. Apparently Atwood, in addition to Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, had published the first-ever anthology of Canadian writers back in the early 70s. Until then, she said, many Canadians didn't realize they had their own native literary tradition distinct from the overwhelming cultural influence of Britain and the United States. Although Atwood is often asked what writers she would include today, she believes that such a book is no longer needed, as the Canadian literary scene has exploded and gained considerable international prestige.

Of course, when this anthology initially came out, it had its fair share of detractors. Atwood was asked by several on the Left why there was no "worker's writing." To which she replied, "Because they didn't write anything!"

Settling into her main theme, Atwood started off with a question she had recently received which she had never received before: "Why are there so many tins of sardines in your books?" In response, Atwood said that she had never noticed this although she supposes it's because she had been camping so often growing up and canned food, including sardines and "klim" (a kind of powdered milk), is what you eat while camping. She has also been asked, on other occasions, why there were so many bathtubs in her books. This is because she has spent a good deal of time in bathtubs rather than showers. However this is more common, she added, for the generation following her own, which had been scared silly by Psycho. Atwood also added that too many authors leave their characters with nothing to eat, and often without good hygiene as well. (This reminded me of The Museum of Eterna's Novel, in which Macedonio Fernández laments the resignation of the cook character for precisely this reason: What will they eat???)

Atwood has also been asked if she hates men. "All men? Because I'm none too keen on Hitler." Do men like her? "I don't know. Why don't you ask some?" Does she hate religion? No, because religion arises from something very deep in the human psyche, related to storytelling, and for this reason she disagrees very strongly with someone like Richard Dawkins, who thinks we should just do away with all religion. What she hates is what religion can become - something to "beat people over the head with."

What was the most thought-provoking criticism someone had made of her work? "That I cut off men's heads and use them as a ladder of ambition." That had been in the 1970s. Most people to day are too stupid to come up with that one, Atwood declared.

And what does she think of the future of the novel? Well, the Kindle and the "unfortunately-named" iPad are certainly here to stay, but seriously, would you really store your will on your computer?

But one aspect of her talk I found most interesting was her thoughts on genre regarding her dystopic novels, including the recent Year of the Flood. Margaret Atwood has drawn some fire from sci-fi circles (I've seen this in the blogosphere too) for insisting that her works be classified as "speculative fiction" rather than as science fiction, even though they are set in the future and include technologies and social conventions that don't yet exist. Atwood started out by asserting that her generation was raised on science fiction and that she had grown up reading American pulps like Weird Tales. I love science fiction, she said, but I don't think my books are science fiction. Science fiction, she went on, is divided into three families. The first is fantasy, which features dragons, like those in Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books, which has absolutely amazing dragons that she, Margaret Atwood, can never hope to write.

The second is science fiction proper, which Atwood sees as descended from H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds. And then there's speculative fiction. Now I had always thought this was an umbrella term for sci-fi, fantasy, and horror all together (and that's how I use it on this blog - see the "Speculative Fiction" category). Atwood's definition, by contrast, refers back to the works of Jules Verne, who disparaged H.G. Wells for "making things up!" Verne wrote stories that could conceivably occur. A lot of what he described did not exist in his time but has since come true. Hence, Atwood sees speculative fiction as projecting current trends and speculating as to their possible outcome. Speculative fiction, unlike Star Trek and Star Wars, can actually happen. Atwood pointed to her own Oryx and Crake, which focuses on genetic engineering. People think I'm just speculating as to the direction genetic engineering will take, she stated, but in reality a lot of what I wrote about is already real. (Seriously? And they make fun of me for eating organic!) Similarly, The Handmaid's Tale depicted the anti-feminist backlash of the 1980s gone seriously awry.

At this point, I found myself thinking of cyberpunk, which refers to stories set in the near future and centering on cybertech as opposed to aliens and spaceships. William Gibson is its Verne/Wells, having got the ball rolling with his mid-80s novel Neuromancer. The genre has since expanded to include such diverse works as Neal Stephenson's fanboyish novel Snow Crash, Masamune Shirow's philosophical manga Ghost in the Shell and its anime spin-offs, and the epic Matrix films. Obviously, you can argue that cyberpunk is perhaps more grounded in reality than something like Flash Gordon or Battlestar Galactica, but I'm still not sure where it would go in Atwood's three-tier definition of science fiction overall. (Actually, I don't remember if "science fiction" was the umbrella term she used for these three groupings. I would think "speculative fiction" would be the right word, but apparently not. Again, according to Atwood, that refers to something very specific).

My first impulse is to include cyberpunk in Atwood's definition of "speculative fiction" (especially since Oryx and Crake is very much a part of the related biopunk genre) but I'm not sure it quite fits. Is The Matrix really any less fantastical than Star Trek? What about something like Dan Simmons's Hyperion series, which contains elements of cyberpunk, science fantasy, and space opera? And isn't fantasy a whole 'nother species from science fiction? Is Atwood really including J.R.R. Tolkien in the same family as Philip K. Dick? And by referring back to the pulps she had been raised with, is Atwood implying that science fiction (her H.G. Wells version) is somehow less "serious" than her brand of speculative fiction? She may claim to love science fiction but I love vampire novels and admit that most of them are pretty trashy. I'm not convinced that enjoying something is always synonymous with respecting it. In the end, I understood what Atwood was getting at, but really, all science fiction is speculative. Which is kind of the point of science fiction, as distinguished from The Lord of the Rings, which is pure, um, fantasy.

Now that I think of it more, I think that's where Margaret Atwood trips up: by lumping traditional (or "high") fantasy in too much with science fiction, which subsequently de-legitimizes or destabilizes the latter's predictive, science-based aspect. But then, my background here is sketchy so maybe someone more familiar with these genres can examine this further? So, not too sure on Atwood there.

From here we moved on to the Q&A section. Unfortunately, I did not get chosen despite raising my hand. (Darn!) Atwood talked some more about promoting native Canadian cultural output and answered a student's question about the inclusion of the academic material at the end of The Handmaid's Tale (basically to give the book an element of hope and to establish that that particular regime did not last forever, and that people were able to move past it and examine it critically). She was also asked by another student if she felt that there were still problematic expectations of women writers. Atwood expressed some skepticism at this, pointing to the sheer diversity of female literary output, which ranges everywhere from "Twilight to Virginia Woolf." I tell you, I positively squeed at that. Margaret Atwood does not approve of Twilight.

EPIC WIN!!!!1!1!!eleventy!!!!

She also made the distinction between "zombie slayers" and To the Lighthouse. Personally, I am totally down with the idea of female zombie slayers but I get her point.

The signing of books segment took place in another building. They did not have the decency to tell us where said building was located. I ended up following a bunch of people in the opposite direction! The actual place was not far, but as I walked I was struck with a feeling of nostalgia reminiscent of what I felt when I returned last May to my own university for my friends' graduation. I realized how so very much I missed college. And the students here looked so young! I stood in line behind several of them, including a guy who announced wearily that it "music theory time." I stood there and found that I wanted nothing more than to join them. I missed this insular world of brick buildings where the only things that mattered were studying and partying with people one's own age.

To any and all present college students: Don't graduate! Take that triple major. Stay where you are!

I had my camera with me, but the line was long and it suddenly felt so gauche to ask Margaret Atwood to pose for a picture with me. So I didn't. They had these little cards and a sign asking you to print in block letters the name you wanted Atwood to put in your book.

I saw Atwood for all of fifteen seconds, in which she signed my copy of Oryx and Crake. I have the book right here as I type this. I wanted to remove the page and have it framed but my mother insists that the point is to leave the page in the book. But it's the title page! Isn't it obvious what book it came from?

So what do you think? Get the page framed or keep it shut up in the book?

I Am Omega, Part Deux (Oryx and Crake)

But suppose. . . there are others. He wills them into being, these possible remnants who might have survived in isolated pockets, cut off by the shutdown of the communications networks, keeping thenselves alive somehow. Monks in desert hideaways, far from contagion; mountain goatherders who'd never mixed with the valley people; lost tribes in the jungles. Survivalists who'd turned in early, shot all comers, sealed themselves into their underground bunkers. Hillbillies, recluses; wandering lunatics, swathed in protective hallucinations. Bands of nomads, following their ancient ways.

I started Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake right after finishing Thomas Glavinic's Night Work. Both novels are post-apocalyptic tales of the "Last Man" variety, centering on the solitary survivor who persists after the death/disappearance of everyone else in the known world. (Mary Shelley's The Last Man was likely the first work of this kind.) But the similarities end there. Glavinic's Jonas woke up one morning, in the present era, and found himself alone on Earth. No explanation is ever given; the remainder of the book is a Kafkaesque account of Jonas's existential musings and struggles with mounting paranoia. Atwood's Snowman, on the other hand, is initially introduced as the protector/prophet of the Children of Crake, a small band of simple-minded genetically-engineered primitives. Snowman lives apart from the "Crakers" in a vast wasteland that was once a highly advanced near-future civilization. What happened? How did it collapse so quickly?

The focus of Night Work is a single individual. What exactly caused the mass disappearance of everyone else is irrelevant. All that matters is that they are all gone. Oryx and Crake, by contrast, is intrinsically tied up with the sudden downfall of humanity. Like many works in the post-apocalyptic genre (with the exception of those dealing with the supernatural), it is a cautionary tale that predicts a supremely disastrous end to human folly and hubris (nuclear holocaust being a popular scenario). Hence, Oryx and Crake - like such diverse works as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Earth Abides, On the Beach, and even World War Z - is fundamentally concerned with human nature, the societies we create, and the technology we invent. What do each of these books say about us? How do they combine recognizable aspects of reality and, in doing so, enable the reader to relate to and identify with their portrayals of global collapse, however outrageous? I mean, zombies? Sentient androids? Oryx and Crake features God-like genetic engineering and the artificial creation of entire new species.

Still, Oryx and Crake feels real, despite its seemingly improbable premise. Snowman - known as Jim in his old life - is facing starvation. The Children of Crake are not "programmed" to be violent; therefore they cannot hunt for him. To make matters worse, the wasteland in which he lives is populated by dangerous escapees from the old genetic labs, such as wolvogs, snats, and pigoons. In search of food and weapons, Snowman must journey back to his old home, the compound once known as Paradice, where his old friend, nicknamed Crake, had experimented with gene splicing in the hope of achieving immortality. Along the way, Snowman reflects back to the times before the grand catastrophe, beginning (for the reader's benefit) with an overview of the civilization he had lived in and then gradually coming to its inevitable end. In its portrayal of the pre-fall future, Oryx and Crake is distinctly biopunk. Like the cyberpunk genre that developed before it, biopunk stories are often set among the underdogs or outcasts of near-futures that feature amoral megacorporations that take the place of conventional government, artificially enhanced humans, and the use of cyber- or biotech as the means of social control in increasingly unstable societies.

Cyberpunk and biopunk are also meant to be realistic - that is, they are meant to depict a world that could possibly come to exist unlike, say, the intergalactic utopianism of Star Trek or the science fantasy mythos of Star Wars. Cultural and technological trends are projected and built upon. Although cybernetic technology seems remarkably undeveloped in Atwood's vision (people are still using DVD's and CD-ROM's, with email as a primary means of communication) the biotech revolution that began in the early 1990s has exploded, resulting in everything from headless, legless pseudo-chickens designed solely as food sources to plate-sized butterflies used as living decorations on college campuses. At the same time, the human population has also exploded; plus, the environment has severely worsened, while the gap between the "haves" (who live in walled-off corporate Compounds) and "have-nots" (who inhabit the dingy, dangerous Pleebands) has alarmingly widened. In a civilization focused obsessively on the casual, uncontrolled, and unregulated manipulation of DNA, life itself has become a mere commodity to be exploited for maximum commercial and/or scientific gain.

When did the body first set out on its own adventures? Snowman thinks; after having ditched its old travelling companions, the mind and the soul, for whom it had once been considered a mere corrupt vessel or else a puppet acting out their dramas for them, or else bad company, leading the other two astray. It must have got tired of the soul's constant nagging and whining and the anxiety-driven intellectual web-spinning of the mind, distracting it whenever it was getting its teeth into something juicy or its fingers into something good. It had dumped the other two back there somewhere, leaving them stranded in some damp sanctuary or stuffy lecture hall while it made a beeline for the topless bars, and it had dumped culture along with them: music and painting and poetry and plays. Sublimation, all of it; nothing but sublimation, according to the body. Why not cut to the chase?

But the body had its own cultural forms. It had its own art. Executions were its tragedies, pornography was its romance.

The anonymous, voyeuristic, and sensational character of the Internet has been taken to its greatest extreme: live suicides, live executions, rampant child pornography, sexual deviancy, ultra-violent gaming. Meanwhile, the kidnapping and assassination of scientists working for rival companies or other countries is commonplace and accepted with blase indifference. As an English major, concerned with the artistic and literary achievements of the past, Jim is basically irrelevent.

In short: Jim's world was already dystopic, even before its fall. Which it probably deserved.

Jim's friend Crake is megalomaniac, borderline sociopathic, and blessed with a genius mind. All qualities held in high regard by their society. And yet, out of the tumultuous world he lives in - where morality has disintegrated, corporations overpower government, human rights are often ignored, dissenters are hunted down, and protests against the biotech-industrial complex are frequently violent - Crake helped to build Paradice. Then, in the midst of the chaos raging outside, he created the "Crakers," drawing on decades of cutting-edge research. The accidental/intentional release of a genetically-engineered virus (perhaps representing the absurdity of humanity playing God and entering territory they should not - like eating the apple from the Tree of Knowledge) leaves the Crakers to Jim. Jim, now Snowman, leads them from Paradice, through chaos, and to a new home by the sea. Along the way, he invents for them a mythology, in which they are the "Children of Crake" and animals are "the Children of Oryx," named for Jim and Crake's girlfriend.

(Oryx really didn't have much of a role beyond Snowman's memories of her as an idealized woman and Jim's actual time with her [in the past], which was basically just sex. There's some exploration of her exploited childhood and how it ties in with the commoditization of life, but she never ceases to be an individual defined solely by her sexuality, even in the jobs she does - like handing out BlyssPluss pills to brothels. A very weak character, in my opinion.)

Crake had believed, nihilistically, that all human behavior - from art to faith to love - could be traced back to biological impulses and evolutionary psychology. That humans are simply exalted animal. It was a belief held by many in their world: tweak some DNA, alter the whole for your liking. The Crakers weren't supposed to be "wired" for religion either, but they ultimately demonstrate that maybe their creator was wrong. Maybe there is something more to humanity after all. Or are we doomed by our unrefined natures? Much as he yearns for others like him, Snowman also worries about the fate of the Children of Crake should other normal humans find them - it may well be like the Arawak Indians naively greeting Columbus.

I think Atwood's vision of a biopunk future is pretty exaggerated. For example, whatever became of the organic food revolution that has picked up in recent years? How could the social and political fabric of society have changed so quickly to a land of Pleebands and Compounds? (It is mentioned at one point that veterans of the "dot-com boom" of the late 1990s are still alive, so we're not that far in the future.) But it is a recognizeable world, one that the reader can easily imagine themselves in, and whose feasability they can speculate upon. Oryx and Crake asks us to consider the ethics of genetic engineering and the value of art and life when cold science seems to promise so much. I've been avoiding The Handmaid's Tale because it seems to be another one of those books that everyone reads and everyone swears by, but I enjoyed Oryx and Crake, so maybe I will give it a try.