<n>Standard disclaimer<fn></n> This is the last of three novels in the MaddAddam trilogy. It picks up where the first two books left off: the rescue of Jimmy and Amanda from the clutches of the two Painballers. Ren and Toby lead everyone home, back to the compound where they've set up camp with the Crakers. Soon, they are joined by Zeb, who takes up with Toby, despite her misgivings that he will take up with the slutty Swift Fox. Despite the high level of education for most of the members of this last group of humanity, the camp starts to devolve into the human behaviors that Crake had recognized as dangerous. Unlike his artificial race of Crakers, this remnant of humanity starts to breed again and entertain petty jealousies. Luckily, the pregnancies turn out to have been initiated by the Crakers. The Crakers, in their naïveté, release the two painballers from their constricting ropes. The current-day part of the plot involves finding a way to eliminate these two without having to kill them. They know they have to deal with them, but are unsure how to retain their own humanity if they just start killing people. The Pigoons turn out to be more intelligent than the Crakers. They make peace with the humans and team up with them against the painballers, who'd killed one of their piglets for sport. A large part of the novel fills in Zeb's and Adams's backstory. Zeb tells of his formative years while lying in bed with Toby, who prompts him for more information, ostensibly to tell the Crakers in the nightly story hour, where Zeb has acquired a starring role. Zeb's feats gain a dimension beyond even those of Crake in the Crakers' eyes. But these stories all get mixed up in the Craker's limited comprehension until myth and reality are indistinguishable. The Crakers will end up knowing what they think they know. <bq caption="Page 70">There’s the story, then there’s the real story, then there’s the story of how the story came to be told. Then there’s what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.</bq> Zeb's backstory is very interesting and fills in some missing pieces---he and Adam One are step-brothers. Their father is a sleazy reverend with a shifty ministry that Adam and Zeb end up taking down, in the end. Zeb is a hacker extraordinaire who uses his skills to squirrel away a lot of the reverend's ill-gotten gains before they expose him to the authorities. <bq caption="Page 294">The least said the better online, even if you thought your space was secure. The net had always been just that – a net, full of holes, all the better to trap you with; and it still was, despite the fixes they claimed to be adding constantly, with the impenetrable algorithms and the passwords and thumb scans.</bq> As in the first two novels, Atwood wraps everything in an admonition to an deaf and uncaring humanity to stop ruining the planet and all of the creatures on it. She calls us <iq>the people in the chaos</iq>. It is against the sins of these people that Zeb and Adam found the God's Gardeners, who end up being some of the only survivors of the <i>Flood</i>. <bq caption="Page 353">The people in the chaos cannot learn. They cannot understand what they are doing to the sea and the sky and the plants and the animals. They cannot understand that they are killing them, and that they will end by killing themselves. And there are so many of them, and each one of them is doing part of the killing, whether they know it or not. And when you tell them to stop, they don’t hear you.</bq> Toby begins teaching a young one how to read and write. This was very much not Crake's plan. But, though he was a genius, he was single-minded and didn't play well with others. What right has such a person to plan the future of all of humanity? The Crakers grow and learn and, by the end of novel, have taken over from the handful of God's Gardeners who shepherded them from the dark intermezzo into their more hopeful present. Perhaps the Crakers will do better. <hr> <ft>Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me of what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you.</ft> <h>Citations</h> <bq caption="Page 43">All the patios must be derelict now, the swimming pools cracked and empty or clogged with weeds, the broken kitchen windows invaded by the probing green snoutlets of vines. Inside the houses, nests in the corners made from chewed-up carpets, wriggling and squeaking with hairless baby rats. Termites mining through the rafters. Bats hawking for moths in the stairwells.</bq> <bq caption="Page 70">There’s the story, then there’s the real story, then there’s the story of how the story came to be told. Then there’s what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.</bq> <bq caption="Page 72">That was how Zeb had positioned himself: bulked up on natural steroids, do what had to be done, could take the pace, wings on the ankles, needed the money, liked the shadowy rimlands where nobody official could stick their tentacles into your back pocket, within which the contents of other people’s hacked bank accounts might be bashfully lurking.</bq> <bq caption="Page 74">“I remember adapt,” says Toby. “It was another way of saying tough luck. To people you weren’t going to help out.” “You got it,” said Zeb. “Anyway, feeding trash to the bears didn’t help them adapt, it just taught them that food falls out of the sky. They’d start slavering every time they heard the sound of a ’thopter, they had their very own cargo cult.</bq> <bq caption="Page 77">The worst of it was listening to the green-nosed furfucker sermonizing that went on in the Bearlifttown bars when you were trying to get spongefaced on the crapulous booze they hauled in there and dispensed by the vatful.</bq> <bq caption="Page 77">[...] he tried to stay out of brawls, never having seen any percentage in rolling around under bar stools with some enraged moron who considered he’d staked eternal twat rights because of his pre-eminent cock and his dimples, and who might have a knife.</bq> <bq caption="Page 85">The Corps didn’t like Bearlift, but they didn’t try to shut it down either, though they could have done that with one finger. It served a function for them, sounded a note of hope, distracted folks from the real action, which was bulldozing the planet flat and grabbing anything of value. They had no objection to the standard Bearlift ad, with a smiling green furfucker telling everyone what a sterling lot of good Bearlift was doing, and please send more cash or you’ll be guilty of bearicide.</bq> <bq caption="Page 92">Some bureauscheme to transport oil inland through a pipeline during World War Two, to keep it from being blown up by coastal submarines. They’d brought a whole bunch of soldiers up from the South to build the system, black guys, a lot of them. They’d never been in subzero cold and five-day blizzards and twenty-four-hour darkness; they must’ve thought they were in hell. Local legend had it a third of them went crazy. He could see going crazy here, even without the blizzards.</bq> <bq caption="Page 97">[...] love to go a-wandering, along the bums of sluts, And as I go I love to sing, although they drive me nuts. Fuckeree, fuckera, fuckeree, fucker ah hah hah hah hah ha …</bq> <bq caption="Page 99">He’d be up against it, up against everything that filled the space he was moving through, with no glass pane of language coming between him and not-him. Not-him was seeping into him through his defences, through his edges, eating away at form, sending its rootlets into his head like reverse hairs. Soon he’d be overgrown, one with the moss. He needed to keep moving, preserve his outlines, define himself by his own shockwaves, the wake he left in the air. To keep alert, to stay attuned to the, to the what? To whatever might come at him and stop him dead.</bq> <bq caption="Page 104">Thank you means … Thank you means you did something good for me. Or something you thought was good. And that good thing was giving me a fish. So that made me happy, but the part that really made me happy was that you wanted me to be happy. That’s what Thank you means.</bq> <bq caption="Page 112">A scar is like writing on your body. It tells about something that once happened to you, such as a cut on your skin where blood came out. What is writing, Oh Toby? Writing is when you make marks on a piece of paper – on a stone – on a flat surface, like the sand on the beach, and each of the marks means a sound, and the sounds joined together mean a word, and the words joined together mean …  How do you make this writing, Oh Toby? You make it with a keyboard, or no – once you made it with a pen or a pencil, a pencil is a … Or you make it with a stick. Oh Toby, I do not understand. You make a mark with a stick on your skin, you cut your skin open and then it is a scar, and that scar turns into a voice? It speaks, it tells us things? Oh Toby, can we hear what the scar says? Show us how to make these scars that talk!</bq> <bq caption="Page 118">You’ve seen the way she looks at Zeb. Eyelashes like Venus flytraps, and that sideways leer of the irises, like some outdated cut-rate prostibot commercial: Bacteria-Resistant Fibres, 100% Fluid-Flushing, Lifelike Moans, ClenchOMeter for Optimal Satisfaction.</bq> <bq caption="Page 136">The Rev had his very own cult. That was the way to go in those days if you wanted to coin the megabucks and you had a facility for ranting and bullying, plus golden-tongued whip-’em-up preaching, and you lacked some other grey-area but highly marketable skill, such as derivatives trading. Tell people what they want to hear, call yourself a religion, put the squeeze on for contributions, run your own media outlets and use them for robocalls and slick online campaigns, befriend or threaten politicians, evade taxes. You had to give the guy some credit. He was twisted as a pretzel, he was a tinfoil-halo shit-nosed frogstomping king rat asshole, but he wasn’t stupid.</bq> <bq caption="Page 205">Already she was beginning to emerge from the initial sex-induced coma created by him through the magic of his first-contact-with-aliens puppy-on-speed gonadal enthusiasm. Young guys have no taste as such in sexual matters – no discrimination. They’re like those penguins that shocked the Victorians, they’ll bonk anything with a cavity, and Wynette had been the beneficiary in Zeb’s case. Not to brag, but during their nightly tangles her eyes had rolled so far up into her head that she looked like the undead half the time, and the amplified rockband noises she made had caused thumping and banging both from the alcohol store on the ground floor and from whatever nestful of mournful wage slaves lived above them.</bq> <bq caption="Page 222">[...] anyone who objected too much was smeared as a twisted Commie bent on spoiling everyone’s fun, even the fun of those who weren’t having any fun. But spoiling the fun they might have later. Their fun-in-the-sky.</bq> <bq caption="Page 223">By extension, anyone who liked smelling the daisies, and having daisies to smell, and eating mercury-free fish, and who objected to giving birth to three-eyed infants via the toxic sludge in their drinking water was a demon-possessed Satanic minion of darkness, hell-bent on sabotaging the American Way and God’s Holy Oil, which were one and the same.</bq> <bq caption="Page 228">[...] the mouldy, leaking buildings had been turned into divided-space unit rentals. These hosted a coral-reef ecosystem of dealers and addicts and pilotfish and drunks and hookers and pyramid scheme fly-by-nighters and jackals and shell-gamers and rent-gougers, all parasitizing one another.</bq> <bq caption="Page 240">Marjorie had a blunt-nosed, brown-eyed, acquiescent face, like a spaniel, and in ordinary circumstances he would have proceeded, but as it was he said he hoped he’d see her around. Such a hope was not the top hope on his list of hopes – that spot was reserved for not getting caught – but it was not the bottom hope either.</bq> <bq caption="Page 250">Now what have I done? she thinks. What can of worms have I opened? They’re so quick, these children: they’ll pick this up and transmit it to all the others. What comes next? Rules, dogmas, laws? The Testament of Crake? How soon before there are ancient texts they feel they have to obey but have forgotten how to interpret? Have I ruined them?</bq> <bq caption="Page 255">Saint Vavilov, who collected the seeds and preserved them throughout the siege of Leningrad, only to fall victim to the tyrant Stalin; and Saint Vandana, tireless warrior against biopiracy, who gave of herself for the good of the Living Vegetable World in all its diversity and beauty. Lend us the purity of your Spirits and the strength of your resolve.</bq> <bq caption="Page 294">The least said the better online, even if you thought your space was secure. The net had always been just that – a net, full of holes, all the better to trap you with; and it still was, despite the fixes they claimed to be adding constantly, with the impenetrable algorithms and the passwords and thumb scans.</bq> <bq caption="Page 306">Down the hallway, purple-carpeted. Up the stairs: smell of a pleasure factory in the off hours, so sad. That moppet-shop smell that meant false raunchiness, that meant loneliness, that meant you got loved only if you paid.</bq> <bq caption="Page 308">“They’re using their vitamin supplement pills and over-the-counter painkillers as vectors for diseases – ones for which they control the drug treatments. Whatever’s in the white ones is in actual deployment. Random distribution, so no one will suspect a specific location of being ground zero. They make money all ways: on the vitamins, then on the drugs, and finally on the hospitalization when the illness takes firm hold. As it does, because the treatment drugs are loaded too. A very good plan for siphoning the victims’ money into Corps pockets.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 312">I am not in this part of the story; it hasn’t come to the part with me. But I’m waiting, far off in the future. I’m waiting for the story of Zeb to join up with mine. The story of Toby. The story I am in right now, with you.</bq> <bq caption="Page 352">Because when he was not looking, some of the words fell out of the egg onto the ground, and some fell into the water, and some blew away in the air. And none of the people saw them. But the animals and the birds and the fish did see them, and ate them up. They were a different kind of word, so it was sometimes hard for people to understand the animals. They had chewed the words up too small.</bq> <bq caption="Page 353">The people in the chaos cannot learn. They cannot understand what they are doing to the sea and the sky and the plants and the animals. They cannot understand that they are killing them, and that they will end by killing themselves. And there are so many of them, and each one of them is doing part of the killing, whether they know it or not. And when you tell them to stop, they don’t hear you.</bq> <bq caption="Page 383">no one could mistake me for anything but an overgrown dim bulb who couldn’t get any other job. Frasket-sitting on a train – how pathetic was that? ‘If you’re where no one expects you to be,’ old Slaight of Hand used to say, ‘you’re invisible.’</bq>