HBO is developing a sci-fi drama series based on Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (Oryx & Crake, The Year Of The Flood, and MaddAddam). The series will be executive produced by Darren Aronofsky, the director of Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, The Wrestler, and Noah. Aronofsky may also direct the series.
(Mild spoilers — and talk of blue penises — to follow.) The MaddAddam trilogy takes place in the mid-21st century, following the lives of the remaining survivors — some human and some genetically engineered — of a viral pandemic started intentionally by titular character Crake (née Glenn) in the first part of the trilogy in an attempt to wipe out everyone but his genetically-engineered tribe of “Crakers”.
Since it’s HBO, we fully expect them to include the mating rituals of the Crakers, in which the men wave their erect blue penises around and a female chooses several of her favorites for a week-long orgy. Oryx & Crake was weird, you guys.
But I call it weird with love, and not just because of the blue penises. Margaret Atwood is awesome. In an interview back in 2003 when Oryx & Crake was published, she described herself as a Pessimistic Pantheist, explaining “God is everywhere, but losing.”
She also made a few prescient statements that may explain why the director of Noah would find her work so interesting.
“The human race is terminating species at an alarming rate. It is thereby diminishing God, or the expressions of God. If I were the biblical God I would be very annoyed. He made the thing and saw that it was good. And now people are scribbling all over the artwork. It is noteworthy that the covenant made by God after the Flood was not just with Noah but with every living thing.”
She also talked about her mindset at the outset of writing the trilogy:
“So I’d been clipping small items from the back pages of newspapers for years, and noting with alarm that trends derided ten years ago as paranoid fantasies had become possibilities, then actualities. The rules of biology are as inexorable as those of physics: run out of food and water and you die.” […]
“I wrote several chapters of [Oryx and Crake] on a boat in the Arctic, where I could see for myself how quickly the glaciers were receding.”
I bet all the blue dicks are a metaphor for melting icecaps. Oh man, I’m so good at semiotics.
