Final Project – Feminism & Technology: Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy

Crake-lendar

When I initially thought of the idea of a God’s Gardeners calendar, I thought it would be a simple task, y’know, putting together the Saints that were already mentioned in the novels, adding a few, and then just putting them altogether in a calendar. And then suddenly it spiraled into this abyss of lunar cycles and lengths of time and the ridiculousness of the human brain.

This project started off as a “simple” calendar of all the GG’s Saints and Feast Days; the only problem was who to list, when to list, and how long said list would be. It somehow morphed into a Craker calendar that would depict how the Crakers saw time, or didn’t see time, after the Flood and after their beloved two-skin friends started going away, with Blackbeard as its creator. I started off thinking they would be similar but then with even more thinking and frustration, I realized that the many nuances of our own Gregorian calendar were creeping into my ideas and simply wouldn’t make sense to the Crakers. Like the idea of adding days to keep up with the sun and moon makes me tired.

I struggled with the nuances of our own everyday lives–seconds, minutes, hours; days, weeks, months; names; reality versus imagination. I sunk myself into the abyss of the weirdness that is our way of living. I realized that our world and the Craker world, although the same world geographically one could argue, are completely and vastly different (and let’s hope it stays that way). I couldn’t force all of our complications onto these unsuspecting Crakers. I had to rid myself of my inclination to follow the norm, that is, our world’s norms, and put myself in the body of a Craker, who are confused at the abstract but completely content with the physical.

The way the Crakers will inevitably create their own society is so reminiscent of us “normal” humans. Take Blackbeard, who was originally just some little kid curious about Toby and wanting to follow her around. Now, /he/ is the storyteller in his world, having been passed it from Toby from Snowman. He was taught how to make ink, how to write, how to use leaves as paper, how to use these leaf pages to make a book, and the cycle continues. Though Crake programmed the Crakers to be perfect and without flaw, not fussing with trivial matters as tumultuous emotions or questioning, what makes the Crakers truly human is the one thing Crake could never have programmed out of them–language.

In reference to my last blog post written, I was, and still am, very adamant on the thought that Crakers should be considered humans. Their curiosity about objects and words they don’t know and their yearning for learning make them human. Crake might’ve wanted to make them post-human, but if he could not program singing out of them, it must be an inherent part of their nature, just as regular speaking is for us humans.

The calendar I made consists of 5 months, each having 3 10-day weeks. I actually found an article talking about a calendar that was found to be 5000 years older than the oldest one we had known so far from Mesopotamia, and it was from Scotland. That calendar also had roughly 3 10 day weeks, so I designed my calendar after that because I see the Crakers as the very base level of a human society, and I don’t mean any offense by that. I chose 5 months because frankly I don’t understand the lunar year in and of itself, but the 29.5 days for a new moon to turn back into a new moon made sense to me.

And the 5 months fits into my assumption that the Crakers would continue to follow a base 10 system as we do now. I know someone here is a math major, but the debate between base 10 and other ones like base 12 are very controversial, but I’m an advocate for our system, especially for the Crakers. I think they would make the most sense of their 10 fingers, and of the already put in place system there is, and I didn’t think it necessary to try and complicate things further.

The Crakers’ celebrations are on the days of the New Moon and the Full Moon, having 10 somewhat feast days, if we want to refer back to the Gardeners. Now for the actual celebrations, I originally wanted to pick a lot of the previous Gardeners’ saints, but I realized that these Crakers aren’t scientists or religious people, aside from Crake and Oryx, so having these random names, like the ones Snowman gave to them, and these random species they never heard of I thought would be a disservice. So the people, or concepts, I chose for the days of celebration are the days of Crake, Oryx, Snowman, Toby, Animals, Plants, the Earth, the Ocean, Peace, and the Soul.

The only mentions of old Gardeners’ saints are for the Ocean, with Schackleton, Crozier, and Oates, and with the Soul, with Julian of Norwich. I chose people close to the Crakers because I don’t think they would be completely okay with the idea of celebrating a person they’ve never seen or heard of before, but having their creators, Crake and Oryx, and the two people who first told them stories, Snowman and Toby, they would happily and willingly celebrate these days. And of course the aspects of nature appeal to them as they are most active with their physical senses and are one with nature.

However, I wanted to add the concepts of Peace and Soul because I feel like even though they were programmed to not deal with that many nuances that someday, maybe even in their near future, the Crakers will progress into more, say, intellectual beings.

I really liked the idea of Blackbeard writing down the calendar, I think someone suggested this to me so thank you, because really he is the next storyteller, after Snowman and Toby pass away.

Book of Days

Crakers for Kids

A children’s book featuring Crake, Toby, Snowman, Zeb, and others!

Today is the Day of the Flood

There are five characters, each with their own story and starting location. Choose wisely!

Knowledge Production in Children’s Storytelling: Crakers for Kids

Creating this project was as much a reflective process as it was a creative one. In addition to choosing a story-line, we had discussed stylistic choices, such as semantics, plot, who the writer would be (human, craker, or future craker), etc.

Choosing who the author would be is important because depending on who, there will be certain intentions in the writing style and plot. For example, if the writer was a human, they would probably imbue their writing with lessons and bias. This is similar to how Toby and Snowman don’t actually give the Crakers neutral statements or facts; Toby’s spiritual beliefs and Snowman’s familiarity with mythology heavily influence what they say to the Crakers. (I guess this would be inactive knowledge reproduction/influence?) If the writer were a Craker, they would be concerned with the facts, the history, and would explicitly mention any lessons. We agreed to have the author as a Craker, specifically one from the future. Another reason this is interesting is because over time, mythology tends to change and the differences in our stories from the novel will reflect a the affect of time passing, and also what a Craker’s interpretation events would be like.

Next, we chose a medium. We decided to mostly use collage. We assumed that if the Crakers were to create a book, they would glean the materials around them, instead of drawing. Watching my group members construct their stories was very interesting. They used different materials like tissue paper, stickers, and pop-outs. They also drew very cute pictures. Their parts flow smoothly.

For my part, I literally made collages. I found children’s books in my home, and I cut out things that were relevant to my story, or that I thought I could use. I actually cut them from some biblical story books, and Highlight magazines. Even though I had created a story prior, when making collages, the pieces that you can or cannot find can change your story. For example, I originally wanted Zeb to eat a bear, but I didn’t find enough pictures of bears in the first place. But I had enough snakes, so my original idea changed.

This whole process was very interesting to me because of a story can change depending on the resources that are around. You can’t mention too many things, or obscure things if you don’t have simple definitions (in this case, pictures) to explain it.

My part also has different versions of the characters. For example, Rev the Terror has 3-4 different variations of dog breeds. Explaining the idea of species and breeds to Crakers would be a little difficult, so having the variations identified as “Rev”, or more simply, “dog” is a very Craker-like mental process.

To construct my character, I found a few articles on tricksters in mythology and folklore. I decided to create Zeb as a self-preserving (objectivist) kind of trickster. This means he doesn’t get involved unless it benefits him. In my story, he doesn’t get involved with Rev until he is directly provoked.

I also decided to create the trickster/hero as a snake, and the villain as a dog. Dogs have always been seen in a positive light, and snakes seen as dangerous (which is true for certain snakes, but the whole Adam&Eve expulsion doesn’t help). We are biologically programmed to not get too chummy with reptiles, but going along with the theme of the novels, I think this biology can change. The snake (and the character) don’t have to be labeled as evil; the dog may be (which makes sense with the wolvogs running around).

Can you survive the Waterless Flood? What will you learn as you try?

My concept for this project started out quite simple- an adventure game set during the apocalyptic event central to the MaddAddam trilogy: the Waterless Flood. The survivors we meet during the novels, such as Ren, Toby, Jimmy, and Amanda, survive due to their isolation from the general population. How would an individual who was exposed to the disease, as most would be, fare?

This question lead me straight into my first roadblock- how exactly was the disease spread? We get the gist of its effects from Zeb’s description of his supposed father as “raspberry mousse”, but what happened before that? This question took a bit of creativity to answer, and I went with the typical route of those trying to invent an illness: spontaneous coughing. One problem solved.

From this project’s conception, I had a good idea of who I wanted this character to be. I saw Nadia as a normal college student, a gamer who stumbles upon something bigger than she could imagine. The MaddAddamites were a secretive bunch, and undoubtedly good at hiding their tracks, as we saw through Crake and Zeb’s use of leap-frogging. It seems unlikely that Crake would have been able to round up every member of the shadowy group. I sought to answer the question of what MaddAddam would look like to an outsider, years after the fact. This lead to another problem- what did the MaddAddam homepage look like? I imagined it as a sort of message board, which could very well have been a point of reference for Margaret Atwood when she was writing Oryx and Crake in the early 2000s.

While writing this story, I found myself interested in elements of Atwood’s world that we only saw through the lens of her male characters, namely the adolescent Jimmy and Glenn. What might a young woman think of At Home with Anna K, for instance? This pulled me into the world of lifecasters and the politics surrounding them. I became similarly interested in female gamers and message board lurkers. This left me with a lot of ideas that seemed impossible to synthesize with the light-hearted, if gory, adventure game I was writing. In the end, I didn’t really combine the two. The more curious or sentimental players among us can learn about Nadia’s thoughts on gaming or CamGirls, while those interested in a more straightforward adventure can play the game without touching upon those issues.

I really enjoyed looking at the world of the MaddAddam trilogy from a perspective closer to my own. Doing so revealed revealed some of the gaps that are present in any fictional world, which can never have all of the color and texture of our own. I was less interested in filling those gaps than I was in playing with them and seeing what might fit. My classmates have exposed some of these gaps in fascinating ways, and I’m incredibly excited to play their games!

Overall, I feel so lucky to have been a part of this class. I can’t remember the last time a class has inspired such fruitful work and discussion! I’m so thankful to our wonderful professor and all of my classmates for making this such a special experience. Have a great summer, everyone!

Recommended Reading:
CamGirls/Lifecasters

Jennifer Ringley:

Hart, Hugh. “April 14, 1996: JenniCam Starts Lifecasting.” Wired.com. Conde Nast Digital, 14 Apr. 2010. Web. 24 May 2016.
A fascinating look into JenniCam, the website of Jennifer Ringley, then a college student. This article gives great insight into lifecasters and CamGirls, as well as their relationship with their fans and the privacy they are allowed.

Burgin, Victor. “Jenni’s Room: Exhibitionism and Solitude.” Critical Inquiry 27.1 (2000): 77-89. Web.

A more scholarly take on JenniCam, and the psychological implications of lifecasting. A bit Freudian for my tastes, but interesting nonetheless.

Ana Voog:

Kale, Sirin. “In 1998 This Webcam Woman Was the Most Famous Person Online.” Dazed. N.p., 27 Jan. 2016. Web. 24 May 2016.

An insightful interview with Voog herself. Voog views her cam as an art piece, one that explores her sexuality and identity. This perception is interesting, especially as the contemporary view of CamGirls zeroes in on how they are sexualized by the viewer rather than their own sexual agency.
A particularly interesting quote: “One of the mediums of the anacam project is time. It’s been going on for nearly two decades, and I’m the only artist out there doing this. It’s so vast. And it’s still a work in progress. Things will become more clear in ten years.”

Saul, Heather. “Ana Voog: What Happened to One of the First Ever Internet Stars.” The Independent. Independent Digital News and Media, 28 Jan. 2016. Web. 24 May 2016.

An overall look at AnaCam, and what has happened in Voog’s life since. Voog links lifecasting to Instagram, in that both use images to sum up the life of the person who is posting them. The main difference between these platforms is their level of automation- early lifecasts such as AnaCam posted a single image every few minutes of whatever the camera captured, while instagrammers choose what elements of their lives they want to reveal to the public.

Gaming

Bryce, J. & Rutter, J., 2005. “Gendered Gaming in Gendered Space”, in Raessens, J. & Goldstein, J. (eds) Handbook of Computer Game Studies, MIT Press, pp.301-310
This article brings up the question of visibility in gaming, particularly for women, that is relevant to Nadia’s status as a lurker on the MaddAddam message board. At the time this article was written, 43% of U.S. gamers were women. However, these women occupied a far less visible space in gaming than men did, both in the spaces where they play their games (bedrooms vs. public game spaces) and in the games themselves. This article links that to damaging gender roles within video games and the gaming community.

Nonnecke, Blair, Jenny Preece, and Doreen Andrews. “What Lurkers and Posters Think of Each Other.” IEEE Xplore. 37th Hawaii Internation Conference on System Sciences, 2004. Web. 24 May 2016.

An investigation into Lurkers- who they are, why they lurk, and how they are viewed in the communities they observe. Lurkers are those who read a message board or online community without posting or becoming a member. This is especially interesting in the context of the visibility (or lack thereof) of female gamers, as discussed in the article above.

Agger, Michael. “4chan /b/: A New Academic Study of the Influential Message Board.” Slate Magazine. N.p., 28 June 2011. Web. 24 May 2016.

God, I love this article. Agger analyzes the influence 4chan has had on popular culture with the innocence and fear felt only for the few years in the early 2010’s in which it looked quite possible that 4chan could take over the world. 4chan, in those days, bore a few similarities to MaddAddam in its political and social influence.

Crakers for Kids

Overall, I really enjoyed creating this project. I think that it was a lot of hard work and was stressful, but that’s what makes it so rewarding to be done.

Having the creative authority to make up storylines and tell the story of the Maddaddam trilogy in the eyes of a children’s folklore story was definitely a challenge. There are a lot of components that we had to consider.

Do we call them the Crakers at all?
A: In some cases we did, just for introductory purposes, however we just shifted to using “we” and “us” to be inclusive.

How sophisticated should the drawings be?
A: We decided not at all, because if they’re just discovering art and delving into it, since Crake didn’t really make them to enjoy art, we figured their skills wouldn’t be amazing and they’d rely on pictures found.

Would they know what ____ is?
A: If it was anything technological from the 21st century, we assumed they did because they left over Humans and prospective Humakers could’ve taught them. Also, being to into writing and possible literature, they may have seen it in books. So we opted to keep things like computers and lightbulbs in. Although, we did make sure to reference that it was “from chaos” or the pre-flood.

All questions like this.

This project really pushed us to think 1000 years ahead in the eyes of Crakers and potentially Humaker hybrids. It was both a challenge and a highlight because I think the creative freedom we each got showed in the distinguishability between the four books. Each book has a certain style that is uniquely ours.

I enjoyed this project because it let us showcase some artistic and creative abilities that we have while simultaneously putting ourselves in the mindset of Crakers and future Humakers.

Creating “Crakers for Kids”

When we were making the stories, our first task was figuring how to distill all of what was to become the lore of the combined Craker and human populations after all of the characters we had grown to know and love had died. We eventually settled on picking 4 characters – Toby, Zeb, Snowman, and Crake. Each group member picked 1 character to write approximately 20 sentence-long pages about.

Although we devised our stories independently, we worked on the actual art together (for the most part). This was so we could create consistency in our visuals – whenever we draw humans, or pigoons, we followed the same style. There was some divergence in our stories (for example, Sarah’s story has no human characters: Zeb’s a snake, and the Rev is a dog), but we didn’t want things to seem like they were all written by one author. Each story is told in our own distinct voice and handwriting (sorry in advance if my handwriting’s difficult to decipher).

We also drew a lot from collaging techniques, mirroring the “gleaning” of the God’s Gardeners, as well as the post-Flood society. Luckily, Christy had a ton of stickers, which helped us add a certain childlike charm to the way we constructed our stories. I had a lot of fun making a two-page collage spread (pp. 29-30), where I used a mix of flattened dried flowers/leaves, tissue paper, and flower stickers to create the God’s Gardeners’ rooftop garden.

I drew my greatest inspiration from Aesop’s fables, because of the instructive nature of Toby’s story. There were some deviations, clearly – I chose to be very explicit with all of my morality, going for an inversion of the essential rule of “show, don’t tell.” Kind of boring, but realistically, it’s what the Crakers (and their perpetual questioning) would prefer. At one point, my story innocently glosses over the deadly fight between the MaddAddams and the remaining Painballers, with a little footnote – if you want to hear more, you can read it elsewhere. That way, I get to placate the prying Crakers, without having to include too much of that difficult-to-explain gore.

We also worked on consistency in terms of Craker lore – for instance, we decided that all characters would move to the “sky” with Oryx and Crake after death, and that Oryx and Crake would exist as humans as well as godlike figures. Since our stories take place a few generations after the events of MaddAddam, we figured some things would become codified as the combined human/Craker culture progressed.

Final Reflections and Sex Worker Rights

Warning: Gushing ahead I have been watching and waiting for this class since last year, and I am so thankful and so thrilled. I was so invested in the Maddaddam world, and this course was the perfect outlet for speculative fiction, technology, cyborgs, and feminism. I love Slack, and all the conversations we have on it, from Ex Machina to veganism. The way that everyone just throws themselves into conversation, pulling up references from different classes, news articles, and various experiences was probably the most inspiring and unexpected part of this class. What an awe-inspiring and standard-setting semester. Have a great summer!

More specifically to my final reflections for the Twinery, I focused on Katrina Woo Woo, and through her, Oryx. In many ways, this is an extension of my final blog post about the fetishization of Asian (American) women. When thinking about how to interpret the roles of Oryx and Katrina Woo Woo, both sex workers and both typified as “Asian Fusion” by white men (respectively Jimmy and Zeb), I immediately thought of the sex worker movement. Some sex workers see themselves as empowered entrepreneurs, conducting business in a savvy and profitable way. They claim their autonomous and nuanced politics through transnational, feminist, and/or sex-positive analysis and organize around issues such as legalizing sex work and marking this work as distinct from a narrative of trafficking victimhood. This political stance is close to the way Oryx defines herself as an empowered and adaptable businesswoman despite Jimmy’s belief that she is the victim trafficked from Southeast Asia. For Katrina, the entrepreneur behind Scales and Tails, sex work is clearly a business that she shapes into an empire, amassing independence and power. Her origins also have ties to history. We first see Katrina in New New York as Miss Direction. In the 1800s, Chinese Americans residing in New York City were predominantly male, with Chinese American women comprising of wealthy merchant’s wives and sex workers. The role that Katrina creates for herself speaks to the power of reclaiming sex work as a business in the male dominated world of the Maddaddam Trilogy.

Katrina’s pet snake could be a reference to the biblical apple and Eve, particularly in one scene in which Katrina is both costumed as an apple with the snake. There is plenty of other significant folklore and cultural practices that involve young women and snakes, from Medusa to Brittany Spears. There is also a particular dance in rural Indonesia called the dangdut goyang, or snake dance. Recently, Irma Bule, an Indonesian singer who had danced with snakes for an extra five dollars, died from snake venom after performing for 45 minutes after she was bitten. She was a young woman from a rural community who performed in order to attract crowds, primarily during election campaigns, and was paid $20 per performance. The stories about her went viral, and Indonesian journalist Made Supriatma frames her story in the spirit of Katrina and Oryx as one of a fighter who “exploits what she can exploit to go on living.” (Time, 2016)

Recommended Reading

Kwok, Yenni. “Here’s the Real Story Behind the Indonesian Singer Irma Bule, Who Died from a Cobra Bite.” Time. [http://time.com/4286323/irma-bule-snake-bite-cobra-singer-dangdut-indonesia/] 8 April 2016.

This is the article that I reference and quote in my paper.

Katsulis, Yasmina. “Gender, Sex Work, and Social Justice: Sociologists for Women in Society Fact Sheet.” Arizona State University. [http://www.socwomen.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/fact_sum2008-sexwork.pdf] Summer 2008.

This article is quick because it is a fact sheet, but these are facts distinguishing sex work from trafficking.

Kempadoo, Kamala. “Globalizing Sex Workers’ Rights.” Canadian Woman Studies Vol 22, No. 3,4 [http://cws.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/cws/article/viewFile/6426/5614] 1998.

This article covers sex work through history, situates sex work within the neoliberal framework, and gives an overview of sex worker rights organizing and issues that these workers face. I have seen this article cited in a few other pieces about sex workers, gendered migrant labor, and transnational feminism. The piece is easy to read, and helps us imagine what migrant sex work organizing and empowerment must look like in the Maddaddam world, and the near future.

Final Reflection: Identity in Hierarchy

“The CorpSeCorps always substituted rumor for action, if action would cost them anything. They believed in the bottom line.” – The Year of the Flood

What made the MaddAddam trilogy so gripping, I feel, is the width of the world. All three books present different slices of pre- and post-apocalyptic human experiences – life through the eyes of Snowman, Ren, and Toby, finally splitting to examine the role of the storyteller in history and fiction alike at the tail end of MaddAddam. The books and their narrative structures lend themselves so easily to being reimagined by another perspective, and that is what propelled me through my part in “Today is the Day of the Flood.”

I started off planning what to do as a final project with vague ideas about retelling the mythology of good, kind Oryx and Crake, the benevolent invented deities, and ended up instead crafting a day in the life of a CorpSeCorpsman. Such is the richness of the text; there are so many avenues left unexplored in the narrative, so many stories untold or demanding more telling. The CorpSeCorps looms over Oryx & Crake, obviously vanishing in the wake of the Waterless Flood. But while the world is still spinning, the Corps maintains its iron grip on the populaces of the Compounds and the pleebs alike. Jimmy, before he’s Snowman, lives in constant fear of Corps interrogations about his runaway rebel mother from the time she vanishes into adulthood. But aside from these appearances, the Corps is largely an invisible force that seems to rule by word of mouth more than force of hand in Oryx & Crake. We as readers don’t know who the Corpsmen were before they were Corpsmen, where they come from, or what their lives are like, and those unanswered questions led me to my character, the junior Corpsman Echo-Minus.

The main theme that led me in my writing was the fact that Jimmy, despite his lack of prized scientific genius, never considers the Corps as a career option. Therefore, I could safely assume that enlisting in the CorpSeCorps is not something a child of the Compounds does. Jimmy is unhappy about ending up at Martha Graham and unhappy with his subsequent jobs until he’s recruited by Crake, but that place for him at Martha Graham still exists, and that’s a luxury he has no awareness of. So who becomes a Corpsman? That question took my story out to the pleebs and I began to explore the concepts of choice and identity and how that translates into social classes in an oppressive dystopian society. Echo-Minus leaves his life, his family, and – most importantly – his name behind in the pleebs he grew up in, desperate for upward social mobility and willing to do anything to grasp at it. He repeatedly has to convince himself that he’s in a better place now in comparison to where he was before to justify sacrificing his identity. He has to keep telling himself he made the right choice, but the fact I wanted to emphasize is that he never had a choice, not a real one. Choosing the Corps over a gang or a religious faction was not a “real” choice, but simply the best one available to him due to the strict social hierarchy that exists over him. Snowman reflects on intellectual hierarchies in the Compounds, while Ren and Toby describe their lives outside those walls and the much harsher hierarchies imposed on them. All these characters are forced into corners and forced to make less than ideal choices: Snowman finds his way back to Crake out of desperation for purpose, Toby ends up with the Gardeners for her own self-preservation after losing her parents and spiraling into worse and worse states, and Ren is abandoned by Lucerne and forced to support herself with sex work. (It’s important to note that she chooses sex work and it’s not a negative reflection on her to do so; however, it’s telling that SeksMart offered the best benefits out of any available profession, and Ren’s decision is motivated by money and less than ideal circumstances: “I wasn’t likely to get anything better without a degree.”)

In the same way, Echo-Minus becomes one with the oppressive system that rules his life and, instead of blaming the system, he blames the product of it: the pleebs themselves. He doesn’t have the benefit of seeing the whole picture. He can only see what’s in front of him, and of course a life in the pleebs is infused with desperation and full of dead ends. Thus, he gives up his identity. I found the idea of Corpsmen being given designated identities that change as they move up the ranks both within the realm of possibility and relevant to the themes of my route in the game – it’s an insidious means of dehumanization. If most Corpsmen come from the pleebs, as I let myself assume, then the Corps would likely be very interested in removing them from their previous lives. Taking one’s name is taking one’s identity, and considering the MaddAddam books are full of people using false names or changing their names along with their situations, I think the Corps designations fit right in thematically. I used the NATO phonetic alphabet, both because it’s an international code and therefore ubiquitous and already associated with government usage, and because the NATO letters carry their own meanings when used in the International Code of Signals. I chose “Echo” solely because of Echo-Minus’s fixation on his past, how it lingers with him and keeps “echoing” in his internal monologue, but “Uniform” and “Kilo,” Echo-Minus’s Corpsman coworkers, were names chosen by their International Code of Signals meanings; “Uniform,” as a single-flag signal, means “You are running into danger,” and “Kilo” means “I wish to communicate with you.” In the story, Kilo-Minus imparts bits of information and Uniform’s absence is Echo-Minus’s first signal that something is amiss in-story. The suffixes of plus and minus were my own idea and impart their own hierarchies: plus at the top, with no suffix being neutral, and minus indicating junior status of some variety. Echo-Minus is supposed to be new to the Corps and Kilo-Minus is likely under observation for the way she talks. Uniform’s in good standing, but not the best.

For a choice-based game, Echo-Minus’s route in “Today is the Day of the Flood” is devoid of actual choice to reflect the fact that his own life is devoid of choice as well. My goal was to trick the reader into assuming they’re making choices, but really, each option leads straight to the next. The order can be played with, somewhat, but only in slight and insignificant ways – for example, what order Echo-Minus does his tasks before leaving for the pleebs. He can’t avoid eventually checking his messages at work, nor can he avoid catching Crake’s plague and dying in the Scales and Tails riot. It was funny, but when I set out writing, my sense of empathy for Echo-Minus was limited; he chose to be part of the Corps, I figured. He sold his soul into this oppressive police force in an effort to get ahead, to save himself at the expense of others. But the more I wrote and the more I thought about him and his life, the more empathy I had. He grew his own dimensions as I wrote through him; I felt his frustration, his feeling of futility, his subconscious knowledge that he was making the wrong choices, his suppressed guilt for abandoning his family, the damage dealt to him psychologically by his father’s death. He made an impossible choice, and no matter what he may have done, there would have been negative side effects. My route ends with Echo-Minus’s death in the pleebs, despite his desperation to not die in the pleebs, but the real tragedy is that he can’t remember his real name. He beat his real name out of his mind, and at that last critical moment as he fights to die as himself, not as “Echo-Minus,” he fails. The entire story is wrapped up in this identity crisis, exacerbated by the external world but fought internally. Echo-Minus depersonalized himself (and the people of the pleebs) to separate himself from his past and his family, but in that process of depersonalization, he lost everything that made him human. This is how the Corps operates. They prey on people desperate for a way out, and merely trap them in a different way.

SOURCES/EXTRA READING

A Study of Prisoners and Guards in a Simulated Prison (1973) [.pdf], otherwise known as “the Stanford Prison Experiment,” a famous study about tensions between the imprisoned and their imprisoners. Most significant to Echo-Minus’s story was how the students designated as “guards” in the study felt they had to prove their authority through violence and other oppressive tactics; similarly, he truly feels a need to prove himself as different from other pleeblanders to distance himself from them and their lifestyle.

Sheckels, Theodore F. The Political in Margaret Atwood’s Fiction: The Writing on the Wall of the Tent (available in part via Google Books). The chapter about The Year of the Flood contains some analysis of the role of the Corps and contemplates how much power they really hold, as well as asserting that relatively little is known about them, which made me feel better about making things up.

Oates, Joyce Carol. “Margaret Atwood’s Tale.” The New York Review (available online). Joyce Carol Oates, another contemporary female novelist, covers a majority of Atwood’s writing in this analysis, but about halfway through she discusses Oryx & Crake exclusively. I liked getting the perspective of a fellow writer.