Cyril Kornbluth, Accidentally Encountered

Margaret Atwood‘s ecological-collapse novel Oryx and Crake, which I have just gotten around to reading, contains a concept that one might call accidentally derivative. Researchers in the book’s pre-collapse era, the setting (in flashback form) for much of the narrative, discover how to breed a giant, brainless lump of chicken cells, a sort of “chicken hookworm,” from which one can harvest meat at will. Long time science-fiction readers will note the similarity between Atwood’s idea* and an equally horrifying entity in The Space Merchants: Chicken Little, a huge poultry-flavored teratoma whose flesh feeds the corporate future’s proletariat. I think the similarity is an accident because I doubt Atwood read Cyril Kornbluth (1920-58) and Frederick Pohl’s novel; the profit-oriented, price-cutting logic of her future dystopia simply pointed in a similar direction. It is unfortunate, though, how few authors encounter Kornbluth’s ideas, if only so that they can build on rather than duplicate them. Not This August is a far grimmer version of “Soviets Invade America” than Red Dawn, whose one-dimensional Russian bad guys seem comically inept compared to Kornbluth's methodically murderous communists. “Two Dooms” imagined a bleakly believable Hitler Victorious future whose survival Kornbluth grounded in the mental and physical starvation of the helot class and the Nazis ' careful use of psychological manipulation. "The Marching Morons," in its cynical cruelty, still feels surprisingly modern - I remember first reading it in 1983 or '84 and thinking it was new. In one respect it is the exception to the above rule: it served as the unacknowledged basis for Mike Judge’s 2005 film, Idiocracy, though Judge played the scenario more for laughs. Atwood, like Judge, might benefit from doing a little more literary slumming.


*Granted, neither Kornbluth nor Pohl thought to have their chicken cancer colony turned into anything quite so memorably and lubriciously named as “ChickieNobs Bucket o’Nubbins.” Atwood can outwrite practically anyone else alive.