Despite a few comments to the contrary that I read on Goodreads, the science fiction presented in the book is linked strongly enough to examples of current real world science to be taken seriously, as is Atwood's ecological links to the effects of global warming. And this is where it is dark, because the bleakness of the future is 100% plausible.
It struck me that some of the criticism against it from the science fiction readers is that in Atwood fashion it is the characters that drive the story and not the science, even as their situation derives from the science. In a peculiar way the science is secondary to the story, which makes it an odd sci-fi book, but in doing this Atwood has perfectly mimicked how the nuts and bolts of our science is secondary to us in our daily lives: the iMac I'm writing on and its connection to the world, smartphones, TV, radio, the automobile, all exist in my life with greater or lesser importance. However their creation, production and distribution are at best of passing concern. And so it is with the protagonist who, again in typical Atwood fashion, is a fully fleshed and flawed human who feels — and largely is — overwhelmed by life in a way that makes him somewhat unlikeable even as we can sympathize with his attitudes.
At one point Jimmy, the protagonist, having proved himself a poor student of privilege, wound up going to Martha Graham, a 3rd rate Arts university. I was amused by her pointed anti-school barbs, and by my finding them similar in spirit to those she wrote in The Edible Woman:
Jimmy had few illusions. He knew what sort of thing would be open to him when he came out the other end of Problematics with his risible degree. Window- dressing was what he'd be doing, at best—decorating the cold, hard, numerical real world in flossy 2-D verbiage. Depending on how well he did in his Problematcs courses—Applied Logic, Applied Rhetoric, Medical Ethics and Terminology, Applied Semantics, Relativistics and Advanced Mischaracterization, Comparative Cultural Psychology and the rest—he'd have a choice between well-paid window-dressing for a big Corp or flimsy cut-rate stuff for a borderline one. The prospect of his future life stretched before him like a sentence; not a prison sentence, but a long-winded sentence with a lot of unnecessary subordinate clauses, as he was soon in the habit of quipping during Happy Hour pickup time at the local campus bars and pubs. He couldn't say he was looking forward to it, this rest-of-his-life.Amusingly, even as I enjoyed her satire of the trend of arts departments striving to be seen as corporately viable and important in our corporatist world, it was here that Atwood allowed herself to step oh-so slightly outside of character.
Nevertheless, he dug himself in at Martha Graham as if into a trench, and hunkered down for the duration. He shared a dorm suite—one cramped room either side, silverfish-ridden bathroom in the middle—with a fundamentalist vegan called Bernice, who had stringy hair held back with a wooden clip in the shape of a toucan and wore a succession of God's Gardeners T-shirts, which—due to her aversion to chemical compounds such as underarm deodorants — stank even when freshly laundered (229-30).
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| Morris Berman |
... In an article in the San Francisco Chronicle of 20 October 1985, David Lampert, himself a graduate of Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, described the "hidden curriculum" of the school as "the subconscious destruction of democratic values." The school's "ethics" course, B295, is (or was then*) a training in how to outflank any external forces attempting to limit managerial autonomy — things such as constitutional entitlements, property, civil rights, and so on.*Note: a quick search on Stanford's web page did not find B295. But a search for 'ethics' found 2135 hits, including such things as Empathy and Ethics - Drivers of Our Shifting Culture.
The course teaches the future business elite "how to stonewall the media, how to present oneself on television and protect corporate interests, [and] how to manipulate the public and Congress ...." Student papers on issues such as the Love Canal come back with comments such as, "Why didn't you advise Hooker Chemicals to sue the journalists who exposed the story?" while an exam question in another course states, "Assume that the memorandum you are writing will be burned before it reaches the Anti-Trust Division of the Department of Justice" (68).
This is an excellent read.
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