I just finished a library book. I've read this author's work before and always found it interesting and thought provoking. As I started and went through the book page by page there were several sentences that literally jumped off the page for me. And, as I continued through the first few chapters I thought that this was probably not the novel I should be reading at such a stressful time in our country....but I was hooked. And so.....
"The CorpSeCorps always substituted rumour for action, if action cost them anything. They believed in the bottom line."
"Then I had to get past the wall," she said. "What wall?" "Don't you watch the news? The Wall they're building to keep the Tex refugees out just because the fence wasn't enough.....it's a CorpSeCorps wall. But they can't patrol every inch - the Tex-Mex kids know all the tunnels, they helped me get through."
"Only braniacs talked like that: not answering your question up front, then saying some general kind of thing as if they knew it for a fact."
"There was another minor epidemic, they were saying, but nothing to get alarmed about. Viruses and bacteria were always mutating, but I knew the Corporations could always invent treatments for them..."
"The minor epidemic they'd been talking about earlier wasn't behaving in the usual way - a local outbreak, one they could contain. Now it was an emergency. They showed a map of the world, with the hotspots lighting up in red....it was like watching the planet being spraygunned. It was an eruptive plague, they said, and the thing was spreading fast - no, not even spreading, breaking out at the same time in cities far apart, which wasn't the normal pattern. Ordinarily the Corps would have called for lies and cover-ups, and we'd hear something like the real story only in rumours, so the fact that all this was right out out there on the news showed how serious it was - the Corps couldn't keep the lid on."
"As for the adverse publicity, they could squelch it at the source, since the media Corps controlled what was news and what wasn't."
Half way through I wondered just when the book was published?
The Year of the Flood
Margaret Atwood
2009
Sadly prescient.
No comments:
Post a Comment