I read Oryx and Crake a few months ago, and really liked how Atwood portrayed AS.
Yeah, I'm quoting myself. So what.
ghotistix wrote:
I'm currently reading Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. When I was about halfway through the book, I was trying to figure out if the character Crake had AS when I turned the page and saw a chapter named "Asperger's U.", referring to the university Crake attends.
Here are a couple passages. Some stuff is confusing like the pleebland stuff, but you can just ignore that.
After five or six months Crake loosened up a bit. He was having to work harder than at HelthWyzer High, he wrote, because there was a lot more competition. Watson-Crick was known to the students there as Asperger's U. because of the high percentage of brilliant weirdos that strolled and hopped and lurched through its corridors. Demi-autistic, genetically speaking; single-track tunnel-vision minds, a marked degree of social ineptitude -- these were not your sharp dressers -- and luckily for everyone there, a high tolerance for mildly deviant public behaviour.
"More than at HelthWyzer?" asked Jimmy.
"Compared to this place, HelthWyzer was a pleebland," Crake replied. "It was wall-to-wall NTs."
"NTs?"
"Neurotypicals."
"Meaning?"
"Minus the genius gene."
I love the refreshing way AS is portrayed. Not as a disorder but as a different, sometimes better way of thinking.
Jimmy was becoming annoyed by Crake's way of introducing him -- "This is Jimmy, the neurotypical" -- but he knew better than to show it. Still, it seemed to be like calling him a Cro-Magnon or something. Next step they'd be putting him in a cage, feeding him bananas, and poking him with electroprods.
29 Jun 2005, 2:17 pm
