Oryx and Crake

Margaret Atwood. Oryx and Crake. Doubleday, 2003.

Jimmy had a couple of term papers to finish before the holidays. He could have bought them off the Net, of course-- Martha Graham was notoriously lax about scorekeeping, and plagiarism was a cottage industry there -- but he'd taken a position on that.  He'd write his own papers, eccentric though it seemed; a line that played well with the Martha Graham type of woman. They liked a dash of originality and risk-taking and intellectual rigor.
     For the same reason he’d taken to spending hours in the more obscure regions of the library stacks. Ferreting out arcane lore. Better libraries, at institutions with more money, had long ago burned their actual books and kept everything on CD-ROM, but Martha Graham was behind the times in that, as in everything. Wearing a nose-cone filter to protect against the mildew, Jimmy grazed among the shelves of mouldering paper, dipping in at random.
     Part of what impelled him was stubbornness; resentment even. The system had filed him among the rejects, and what he was studying was considered— at the decision-making levels, the levels of real power— an archaic waste of time.  Well then, he would pursue the superfluous as an end in itself. He would be its champion, its defender and preserver. Who was it who’d said that all art was completely useless? Jimmy couldn’t recall, but hooray for him, whoever he was. The more obsolete  book was, the more eagerly Jimmy would add it to his inner collection.  [p195]

COMMENT

     Margaret Atwood’s razor-sharp wit skewers the "library of the future."  On the very first page of the Maddaddam trilogy human civilization has managed to destroy itself. Among the few (fully human) survivors is Snowman-the-Jimmy, now living among genetically-engineered Crakers, hyper-sexual blue demi-humans designed by asocially maladapted young man. The joke is that Jimmy’s education (at Martha Graham Academy, a school named to honor interpretive dance) is worse than useless. He has no survival skills. The remnant library offers no help since everything of value was converted into digital formats that can't be read now that the grid no longer exists.

   In an utterly sadistic twist typical of Atwood’s fearless writing, the actual print books that remain in the Martha Graham library are not only literally toxic, but  come from that most useless of genres— self-help books. In the end,  the remnants of useful human knowledge are transmitted by Toby, a middle-aged woman with practical knowledge of gardening, beekeeping and herbal medicine that she acquired by living with preppers in a doomsday cult. 

     Atwood's satire takes a dig at a kind of library futurism that was especially in vogue around 2003.  Futurists, predicting the imminent  Death of Print, were in a rush to digitize everything. In the process they attacked core values of librarianship and libraries as outdated and useless. The futurists did a lot of damage.  They convinced politicians to reduce library funding, and convinced librarians to reject collection and preservation as important activities.  The pushed people out of libraries into online space. If only those digital-futurist librarians had read Oryx and Crake perhaps they might have felt a bit less hubris about imposing their flawed vision on the actual future.