Originally posted on my short-lived reading journal on Tumblr, moved here on 04/13/2024

I started the final book in the Maddaddam series this weekend.

I wasn’t impressed enough with the previous two books to hunt down the 3rd until I happened across it at a bookstore–already in paperback. This is Margaret Atwood’s take on the currently hip and hot dystopia (although let’s be clear–Atwood totally got there before the Hunger Games), and it’s certainly less escapist reading than the latest critique of YA fiction in the Guardian would have you believe. I’m finding this 3rd book, if anything, uncomfortable, a theme in the fiction I’m reading lately.

I’m getting old (? not actually sure what to attribute it to) enough now that the romantic relationships seem like more than just foils or character devices. I seem to be able to see the space between two characters, now in a way that I don’t think I ever did before. It’s kind of strange, I re-read American Gods recently, and I found myself incredibly sympathetic to the protagonist’s relationship–in the past I thought he was a weird strange kind of push over.

The first book in the Maddaddam series, Oryx and Crake, was one of my best friends in high school’s favorite book for a while there. I think I found it boring when I tried to read it (okay, so maybe I’ve been bearish on dystopias for a while now), but eventually got around to it sometime before college–clearly it didn’t leave much of an impression. D bought me a copy of the 2nd in the series as a surprise book present when it first came out, shortly after we started dating. We were living on Alameda on the time, and the bookstore on the island was maybe 10-20 blocks down the road–it was hot that September in the East bay (I think it’s always hotter in Alameda than in Oakland or Berkeley, actually) and he was sweating when he came in the apartment door. I read the book in a night, but only have dim recollections of it now, 3 years later, something something biopharmaceutical lab, something something peak oil–a plotline that felt too pat for 2011 America, and not futuristic enough to be from the time it was allegedly telling us a story from.

Futurism is hard, and the role of science fiction is certainly up for debate (as Margaret Atwood is happy to chip in on), but I’d like to think that there’s more to it than blah-blah-blah nice setting for remarks on contemporary problems. Our contemporary problems are just that–contemporary, and honestly nothing about the specifics of our current environmental-political-social crisis has any intrinsic significance. Science fiction is just a kinda fiction, honestly, and fiction’s capacity and abilities don’t lie in the intrinsic plot, but appear when you go deeper and start to probe into the why and the wherefore and the who of we are.

Anyway, so I’m still having trouble stomaching reading the 3rd book. It’s uncomfortable. These people are not comfortable, in a way that I think fluffy dystopia doesn’t get at. Fluffy dystopia is actually super comfortable, an escapist read, a superhero to save the day. So far, there’s no superhero in this book–just a woman with an uncomfortable relationship with a man she’s not quite sure loves her enough, the folks they’ve fallen in with, an alien species, a pair of meanspirited enemies, and the possibility of running out of food supplies needed to outlast them all.