In “Science Fiction and Utopia in the Anthropocene.” Canavan connects science fiction to how we see the future. Ever since I was a kid, growing up in the early 2000s, Sci-fi has always been about the next big thing. Flying cars, watches with holograms, space colonies, aliens, whatever.  Canavan argues that now, in the Anthropocene, the tone is different. Instead of the bright, shiny futures, the majority of sci-fi feels like a disaster. Everything’s on fire, the world is flooded, we’re all fighting for scraps. And honestly? That doesn’t even feel like fiction anymore. Canavan points out that this is exactly the issue: if the future is all disaster, how do we imagine otherwise? It is so easy to imagine a dystopia because it resembles so closely what we already know. The heat waves, hurricanes, and every oil spill are like another chapter in a novel we did not choose but somehow found ourselves reading.

But Canavan doesn’t stop there. He pushes back with the idea that sci-fi can still be about utopia. Not utopia in that cheesy sense of a perfect, flawless world. More like: what would a better world actually look like? Which interests me because it’s one thing to point out how bad things are and say “ohhh yeah, they’re bad”. It’s another thing to say, “we’re still allowed to dream, even now”. If we are all ever picture is collapse and Chos, then aren’t we just preparing ourselves to give up?  But imagining better things, even small ones, keeps hope alive. It’s not necessarily flying cars and holograms. Maybe it’s communities caring for one another, or people learning to share rather than compete. Maybe it’s figuring out how to live with the damage we’ve already done without making it worse. None of that’s perfect, but it’s still something worth holding onto.

Canavan’s idea of how we should look into the future taught me that science fiction isn’t just entertainment, but it’s a way of thinking. It’s practice for thinking beyond what feels inevitable. And right now, when “inevitable” looks like floods and fires and chaos, that practice matters. Once we stop imagining other ways to live, we’ve basically accepted that the end of the world is the only story left.
So yeah, sci-fi won’t fix climate change. But it might keep us from giving up too soon. And in the Anthropocene, that feels like a survival in itself.

I hope I can be forgiven for this blog post, because what I’m including here has the scope of a 10-12 page paper (maybe not a good one), so I will be posting the basic idea for that potential paper, including sources that I was reminded of during my reading, but they won’t be properly cited and compiled. Nor will it include citations to the book itself, although I have been marking up the book and could get specific page numbers for everything I cite here, given a few hours.

The world of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake jumps frequently and seamlessly between masculinist violence, capitalist exploitation of the environment and of human life, and the trajectory of sexuality in a world preparing to move beyond the human form.

There are a wealth of lenses one could take in approaching this book’s themes. Throughout chapter 6, we follow the emergence of the wrist-watch man into the impoverished village of Oryx, and his retreat back into the tourist town with several sold children. This is followed by his insistence that the poor villagers are actually indebted to him for these exploitative trades, which mirrors very closely the U.S. government strategy of rooting African-Americans into the social order by way of offering camp-based relief after natural disasters; the very method of exploitation is then touted as a token of sacrifice from the benevolent government to the “dis”-possessed African-Americans [Allred, “Darkness on the Edge”].

That would be one interesting angle to take, in this outline/blog post, however, I would like to examine Margaret Atwood’s relation to Freudian psychoanalysis. The idea for this comes from a talk by Margaret Atwood, “Ophelia has a Lot to Answer For,” and a paper by Fiona Tolan entitled “The Psychoanalytic Theme in Margaret Atwood’s Fiction.” In both Atwood’s lecture and Tolan’s paper, the idea is that Atwood is engaged in a feminist critique of psychoanalysis.

Thesis: Atwood is unwittingly partaking in a psychoanalytic critique of psychology with her emphasis on enjoyment (Jacques Lacan’s word in French is “Jouissance”) and desire, whether or not she fancies herself anti-psychoanalytic. Or, it could also be said that she takes up the views of the later Freud against the earlier Freud. Particularly, she takes a Freudian view of trauma from “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920) and turns it against an earlier Freudian conception, from “Studies in Hysteria,” (1896, written alongside Joseph Breuer).

Furthermore, Atwood is on the side of sexuality alongside psychoanalysis (figures like Slavoj Žižek warn about the end of sexuality and bodily relations in the digital age), she agrees with it’s not-determinative conception of trauma, and even her concept of religion (which does in fact go directly against Freud) has been mirrored in a recent shift by certain Lacanian thinkers [Richard Boothby, “Embracing the Void”].

Crake’s position is anti-sexuality as such (though, his journeys into p***ography and snuff might call some of the character’s own points to contention), Jimmy takes up a masculine sexed position–emphasizing the joy of the chase and the conquerorship, even in his chats with Oryx, he simply wants to “defeat” her in coming to know her secrets–and, finally, Oryx maintains the desire of her partner Jimmy by eternally withholding what he claims to want. She reads his desire and understands very well that what he wants from her is her obstinacy and the struggle to know.

According to Tolan, Jimmy is a figure of the psychoanalyst. I would agree with this for several reasons. First and foremost,  Snowman’s mythology for the Children of Crake and Oryx is a very clear callback to Freud’s invention of a myth in “Totem and Taboo” (1913). However I would add that he is a Wild Psychoanalyst [Freud, “On Wild Psychoanalysis”], or a psychologist and not a psychoanalyst proper. He wants to direct Oryx into a certain relation to her own history rather than to simply shake up how she writes that history (as an analyst would). She is not traumatized the right way, according to him. She speaks too plainly about what has happened to her and this troubles him endlessly. In Colin Wright’s paper “Lacan on Trauma and Causality,” he makes the distinction between different Freuds. When you speak about Freud’s view of trauma, you must necessarily specify “Which Freud?” Because his view changes dramatically over the course of his work. In 1896, he believes that hysteria is inevitably caused by certain traumas, that lead hysterics to reminiscing until they eventually work through it, which can be helped with hypnosis. Long after the invention of psychoanalysis as the talking cure, Freud introduces the concept of retroactivity (Nähchtreglichkeit) into trauma. This happens in 1919-20 with “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”. What this means is that trauma is not the past event itself, but the way that the event remains in everyday life and is “called back” to by certain elements of our lives, actions, and the real world. This, besides revolutionizing how we look at trauma, also introduces subjectivity to trauma. No one is a hopeless victim to their past, to the repetition of their trauma, instead they necessarily take an active role as subjects. This is what Oryx does and this is how she befuddles the confused old Snowman.

If Jimmy’s point is that Oryx doesn’t relate to her own history in the “right way”, that she should be traumatized, then Oryx’s character stands in for the fact that “we are determined by our history but in a non-determinate way” [Joan Copjec, “The Orthopsychic Subject”].

If Atwood takes issue with the diagnostic category of “hysteria,” she should note that much of the historical baggage of masculinist repression that this word has taken on is directly anti-psychoanalytic. In psychoanalysis, there is ontologically no such thing as an overreaction [Adam Phillips, “On Being Too Much for Ourselves”] therefore a claim like “be quiet, you’re being hysterical” would not only be a blatant signal of masculinist violence, but ALSO an anti-psychoanalytic mistake (being both clinically and theoretically wrong). Any woman who, failing to fit into a patriarchal structure, has been referred to an analyst to shut her up (like Betty in “Mad Men”) has fallen prey to Wild Analysis, something running counter to Freud’s project.

Psychoanalysis doesn’t deny realities of violence, but by opening up the space of subjectivity (not Foucaltian subjectivity that arises out of a combination of discourses, but a subjectivity that exists in the gap between established discourses), it shows that we can choose how to relate to our experiences of violence, not only retroactively as an act of looking back at things long past but also in the present, looking forward. For example, a death row inmate can ask for mercy, or he can approach the chair with dignity, claiming that he deserves it. There is always a space for freedom; we are doomed to be free.

The following is a list of sections from Oryx and Crake that I think exemplify psychoanalytic concepts, (if I was braver, I would make the claim that Atwood is well aware of this connection and she is consciously a reader and supporter of psychoanalysis):

Crake’s chat about humans imagining their death is a condemnation of fantasy, he wants sexuality without fantasy or desire. Sexuality without the mess, you could call it. However, I would like to echo Judish Butler in reminding Crake that sexuality is itself the mess, and what you get when you take the bad parts out is not even human as such.

When Snowman tells us that he can find nothing attractive in the perfect Children of Crake, he is pointing out that an entirely perfect body lacks the objet petit a (Object Small a, a stands for “autre,” referring to the concept of a little other, or dimply another person). Objet a, Jacques Lacan’s invention, is an obstacle to desire that actually impels desire. I notice that my friend has a strange receding hairline and I think, “he would be really attractive if he just didn’t have that!” This, in psychoanalysis, is definitive proof that I find him attractive. A simpler to recognize example is a little mark on your car that impels you to desire to wash it off, or maybe to wash the whole thing.

When Jimmy cries out to his imagined, unseen, listener, that listener is the Lacanian concept of the big Other.

Sublimation and the Unconscious are also mentioned.

When I read the first five chapters of Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, I felt like I was entering a story that was strange but also familiar. The beginning doesn’t explain what has happened to the world. Instead, we see everything through Snowman’s eyes. He lives in a ruined future, and right away I could tell Atwood wanted us to feel lost and confused. We only learn about the world in small pieces, just like Snowman remembers his past in small pieces. This made me feel the same way he does alone, unsure, and haunted by memories.

What stood out to me most is how Atwood shows survival. Snowman’s life is simple, he has to find food, stay alive, and talk to himself so he doesn’t feel so lonely. It made me think about how fragile life is without the comfort and technology we depend on. Even though we don’t know the whole story yet, Atwood’s description of his hunger and the ruined environment show the cost of human actions. To me, it feels like she is warning us about what can happen if people push science too far or ignore the Earth.

Another theme I noticed is memory. Snowman thinks about Oryx and Crake over and over, but not always in a clear way. Sometimes his memories feel real, and other times it seems like he is inventing or changing them. This shows how memory can be strong and weak at the same time. For Snowman, memory is the only way to connect to people he once knew. But it also shows how much he doubts himself and how lonely he has become. It made me ask a bigger question: when everything else is gone, how do we hold on to truth and identity? If our memories fade or change, what is left of us?

I also noticed how Atwood uses Snowman’s voice. His story jumps back and forth between the present and the past without warning. Normally this might be confusing, but here it works because it shows how pain and loneliness affect the mind. For me as a reader, it feels like each memory is a puzzle piece. We know Oryx and Crake are important, but in these first chapters we only get small hints of who they were and what happened. This slow reveal makes the story tense and keeps me wanting to know more.

The setting is also powerful. Atwood doesn’t explain everything at once. She gives us broken details empty landscapes, strange creatures, and the feeling that science has changed the world. By mixing small personal moments with big questions, she makes the setting feel real. I could imagine Snowman sitting by the shore or searching for food, and at the same time I could feel the weight of a much bigger disaster. This balance between personal and global makes the book strong.

Overall, the first five chapters of Oryx and Crake set up the main ideas of survival, memory, and the dangers of human desire. Atwood doesn’t give us all the answers, but she gives us just enough to make us want more. As I read, I kept thinking about how close our own world feels to the one in the book. With science and technology moving so fast, and with the environment under so much stress, it doesn’t feel impossible that something like this could happen. That makes the story both interesting and scary.

What I like most is that Atwood shows both a broken world and a broken man living in it. Snowman’s loneliness, doubts, and memories make the story feel human, even though the world is dystopian. For me, this is what makes the book meaningful. It is not only about the end of the world but also about what it means to be human when everything else is gone.

One idea that caught my attention in Mihaela Ciobanu’s article, “Rewriting the Human at the End of the Anthropocene in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy,” is how the story itself becomes a way that might save humanity after everything else has failed. In Atwood’s article, a society ruined by corporate greed, climate change, and unsuccessful scientific experiments is portrayed. Regardless of this destruction, the characters still continue to create stories. In addition to providing entertainment, these stories are emphasized as a means of protecting memories, teaching morals, and helping both new and existing generations understand what it means to be human. Ciobanu demonstrates how the genetically modified Crakers, who are supposed to be “post-human,” rely on human narrative to interpret the world around them. They hear stories from Snowman (Jimmy) about Oryx and Crake that resemble religious teachings or myths. This tradition is later carried on by Toby and other survivors, who establish a storytelling system that provides the Crakers with a sense of identity and history.

Also, the idea that an act of telling a story can maintain humanity even in a time of technological, societal, and cultural problems is what truly caught my attention because when you look at today’s society, all you see is technology, how us as human beings strive from it. So the fact that simply telling a story can keep civilization alive genuinely intrigues me. This makes us consider how, even in times of struggle, people still rely on storytelling. For instance, people used journals, recorded videos, and online story sharing throughout the epidemic to express their feelings of anxiety, grief, and hope in addition to documenting what happened. Storytelling is essential in Atwood’s article. It may not directly protect us against a virus or climate change in our environment, but it does help us figure out who we are in a time of stress. The belief that stories have the power to change us into more compassionate beings is another aspect of Ciobanu’s reading. Despite their innocence, the Crakers develop relationships and even moral principles as a result of the stories they hear. This demonstrates how stories shape the world rather than just expressing it. They can help us imagine better futures, remind us of previous mistakes, or teach empathy.

In conclusion, Ciobanu argues that Atwood’s trilogy serves as a warning about more than only the Anthropocene and human destruction. It also serves as a positive reminder that we still can “rewrite the human” as long as we can tell stories. That causes me to consider my own life and how the stories I tell or hear can influence my behavior toward other people and the environment.

I don’t know where to find the blog post prompts. I can only find the first prompt which was just linked to an old post from like 2023. If anyone can find it let me know thanks ^_^. If possible I’d prefer if there was like a list of all of the prompts.