Fiction Predictions: ChickieNobs Anyone?

Oryx and Crake

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 Nidaou on DeviantArt

Can you imagine buying a protein product that was grown in a vat, completely detached from a brain, a beak, or a central nervous system? While you're at it, picture a medical facility where a human life is saved using a heart harvested from a genetically engineered pig. If this sounds like a far-fetched future dystopia, it was, but now these are literal snapshots of modern reality. 

Welcome back to Fiction Predictions. 

This month we explore Margaret Atwood’s chilling 2003 dystopia, Oryx and Crake. Decades before biotech startups began serving cultivated meat and surgeons successfully crossed the species barrier in organ transplantation, Atwood mapped it out for us in story. But was she seeing the future, or, as she claims, simply following a logical thread to its conclusion

Author & Book Overview

The Author: Margaret Atwood is a literary icon, a master of speculative fiction who anchors her worlds in harsh realities rather than fairytale fantasy.

The Book: Make no mistake, Oryx and Crake (2003), the first book in her MaddAddam trilogy, is a dystopian novel that can take a hot minute to get into. Once hooked, it will reveal itself through the eyes of Snowman (formerly Jimmy), the lone human survivor of a man-made apocalyptic plague. Told through flashbacks, the story immerses us in a corporate-controlled world where we meet Jimmy's genius childhood friend, Crake, and the mysterious woman they both loved. Not unlike themes in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Taneth Lee's Silver Metal Lover, we live through unchecked scientific hubris that doomed humanity. Not for the faint of heart!

The Setting: As you can imagine, it's a bleak, corporate-dominated future where gene-splicing is a consumer-driven pastime and society is strictly divided between wealthy tech compounds and chaotic slums.

The "Predictions"

Lab-Grown Meat: Enter "ChickieNobs," genetically modified organism chunks that grow breasts and wings without brains or feelings. This mirrors today's rapidly advancing cultivated and cellular meat industries. (Forget about shopping organic, pesticide-free, non-GMO, let alone no bad oils).

Spliced Animals: And here we have "pigoons" (pigs bred to grow human organs for transplants) and "splices" like "snats" (snake-rats). The word sounds cute, but trust me, they aren't. Today, scientists are already onto it, growing human organs inside pig embryos (xenotransplantation).

Biotech Pandemics: The plot revolves around a man-made global pandemic engineered inside a corporate lab to wipe out humanity. It perfectly mirrors, if not reality, then the modern anxieties regarding synthetic biology and biosecurity.

Extreme Climate & Hyper-Consumerism: The book depicts a world of blistering UV rays, collapsed ecosystems, and corporations commercialising everything from youth serums to suicide.

Was Atwood a "Seer"?

I want to say yes, but I know Atwood famously claims she does not predict the future; she simply looks at the present and follows the trends to their logical conclusions. Still, is that now a form of 'seeing'? Is that so much different from Shelly, Lee, Ballard, the rest...?

What do you think? I would love to see your thoughts in the comments.

Kim 📘 🙏🏼 💙

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About Kim Falconer

The Amassia Series

Kim Falconer, also writing as AK Wilder, has released Crown of Bones, a YA Epic Fantasy with Curse of Shadows as book 2 in the series. 

 Quantum Enchantment

Kim can be found on AKWilder.com, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and KimFalconer.com. 

Throw the bones on the AKWilder.com site. See you there!

Read Blood and Water, a PNR alt history that will leave you questioning every natural disaster ever endured.

“There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.” 

Food That Goes Bump in the Night

Image by Stephanie Pui-Mun Law

I was talking to my editor about a scene that involved a feast and we got sidetracked on how food can become a character, showing us as much about a culture as their clothes, art, dance and music. How it is grown, harvested, prepared, the seasons and the seasonings, are part of a map to the story's worldbuilding.

And in Fantasy, food can also be magic. I thought it would be fun to play with some examples today.

Margaret Atwood's very first novel had a magical realism feel to me. Her use of food as a mirror of the main character, Marian, created a vivid story of shifting identity, self-awareness and lose of Self. representing Marian's identity.

Both the book and the film, Chocolat, delighted me. The creation of the chocolates seemed like an alchemical process to me and the senses that awake in the process, spellbinding!

And speaking of spellbinding alchemy, The Book of Unholy Mischief turns pages into a journey of the senses. "Luciano is plucked up by an illustrious chef and hired as an apprentice in the palace kitchen. It's an initiation into a rich and aromatic world filled with seductive ingredients and secrets..."

The magic in this book is mouthwatering, and the 'gift' the child receives more a curse... or is it. The element of emotional communication and the uncertainty of feeling 'for another' had my attention right from the start.

Holmberg's book is almost a reverse alchemy of Amiee Benders's above. In Magic Bitter, Magie Sweet, Marie doesn't sense the emotions of others through eating but can instil emotions and powers into things she bakes. A whole new look at the Gingerbread Man, that's for sure.

One of the earliest uses of food as magic comes to us via fairy tales where food is not only enchanting but once eaten, ordinary food tastes like dust. 

What I love the most about food as magic, is that it crosses genres, generating a sub-genre of its own that includes fantasy, historical, romance, contemporary, crime, mystery, thriller and of course YA and children's books. ie Snow White anyone? 

What books with food, magical or otherwise, are your favourites? I'd love to hear.

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Kim Falconer's New YA Fantasy Series is out in 2019 - The Bone Throwers. Also check her urban fantasy out now - The Blood in the Beginning - and Ava Sykes Novel and the SFF Quantum Enchantment Series. You can find Kim on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Kim also runs GoodVibeAstrology.com where she teaches the law of attraction and astrology.