I’ve been re-reading Oryx and Crake for my Science Fiction and Environmentalism class at FAU. Atwood’s an amazing writer—lyrical, funny, smart. But I was more disturbed this time around by the Pigoons than I was the first time I read the book. Maybe because I’ve been thinking much more about animal intelligence these days. I’m not sure. But they horrified me on a visceral level, which is odd, because I remember thinking before that they seemed almost silly. And then this morning I read about the enviropig project in Canada, which aimed to genetically engineer a pig that would not produce as much phosphorous in its droppings as normal pigs do. The funding for enviropig has just been cut, but I wonder how much press it got when Atwood was writing the book.
