Author Archives: Amber

I kind of miss the aliens: reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents as Critical Dystopia

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Parable of the Talents is a critical dystopian narrative in which the United States falls apart at the hands of religious zealots – Christian Americans – who purportedly seek to return America to puritanical values, but who reframe religion into an increasingly rigid and political force. The overlap of the political system with a religion that seeks to proselytize and convert people to the “truth” feels vaguely familiar. However, in this novel, there is no sanctioning body putting a stop to what would certainly be called human rights violations. We are launched into a dystopia without a back story about the function of the rest of the world, particularly the Western world. All of the world agencies, like the United Nations, that should be intervening in this world are seemingly no longer active. The United States democratic government seems to be a farce, allowing groups with power operate entirely outside of the criminal justice system and without the morals and ethics protecting individual autonomy that we value.   Continue reading →

Disability in Oryx & Crake

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As a feminist disability studies scholar, reading Oryx and Crake triggered a tiny bit of outrage about the treatment of disability within the novel. The character of Crake is one of the most interesting in regard to disability studies scholarship. Towards the mid to later part of the novel, when Crake gains admission to the most scientifically elite university in the United States, Watson-Crick, and Jimmy visits him there, we see several troubling things. There is a direct reference to that university as Aspergers U. The university is widely acknowledged as a place where students as a whole lack virtually any social skills. The students who are introduced, are, through Jimmy’s eyes, so robotic in their intensity, that they ultimately become less human, losing the trappings of civilization. In the dining hall, Jimmy observes that “Crake’s fellow students tended to forget about cutlery and eat with their hands, and wipe their mouths on their sleeves. Jimmy wasn’t picky, but this verged on gross” (208-9). This is a moment where we watch Jimmy observe people with incredible intelligence, and yet reduce them to sub/non human because of their table manners. The white colonial gaze is not absent from the world of Oryx and Crake, even if it is arguably functioning as a defense mechanism in this novel. Continue reading →