He also becomes a more Tintin-ish, stylized version of himself, wandering through a nightmarish post-catastrophe landscape where cyclopean monsters trade omelets for cigarettes.
Spelling and grammar, apparently, will be more arbitrary in the post-catastrophe world, but squirrels will be every bit as tasty as they are now.
It's a dramatic device to bring us to the most chillingly science-fictional recognition of all: that our civilisation, too, is one of post-catastrophe recovery.
Still, behind the piles of cashmere sweaters, concessions -- some large and most small -- to post-catastrophe New York are being made.
One reader expressed herself surprised that he could simultaneously be producing his bleak post-catastrophe tale and his charming Frances books for infants.
Post-catastrophe, he finds it hard to remember any language.One of Ms Atwood's themes in "Oryx and Crake", as in "The Handmaid's Tale", is the fragility of memory, and therefore of civilisation.
The story follows Captain Martin Walker, sent into a post-catastrophe Dubai with an elite Delta Force team on a reconnaissance mission that soon descends into chaos, both external and mental.
Then, after yelling at his dad and his sanctimonious older brother and hugging his mom, Jake takes off again — only, post-catastrophe, to return to town at the wheel of a school bus full of children he rescued out there in the dark, including one to whom he gave a lifesaving tracheotomy by fashioning a breathing tube from juice-box straws.
He speaks with pride about the post-catastrophe assistance from other countries — a community of prefabricated houses sent by Venezuela after another era's devastating hurricane, and a bridge from Japan and a cricket stadium from China after the more recent storms.
It is there in the relentless pull of the future that echoes through Underworld and Cosmopolis; in the toxic clouds and designer drugs that permeate White Noise; in the panic of post-catastrophe New York in Falling Man; and in the fearful message from outer space in Ratner's Star.
For many of these catastrophes, isolated refuges could keep some people alive and enable them to rebuild civilization in the post-catastrophe world.
