A Short History of Progress

Has anyone read Ronald Wright's A Short History of Progress?

As I said in class, I was really conflicted when reading Oryx and Crake - basically because I expected Margaret Atwood to be fairly didactic (an unsympathetic assumption on my part), and instead found her to be detached and difficult to place on any particular moral or ethical compass.

I did find Crake's character fascinating, because of his single mindedness in finding an elegant solution to what he felt were the world's problems. I remember two big rants about the development of agriculture - one by Crake and one by the housemates of one of Jimmy's girlfriends at Martha Graham - which ended in a horrifying image of the world's population just crawling around in giant tubes, feeding upon randomly selected and processed members of their own 'community' through smaller tubes. Another example of simply existing, not living?

A year after Oryx and Crake was written, Ronald Wright also presented the development of agriculture as one of the causes of unchecked progress, and thinking about this I started entertaining the idea of what Ronald Wright and Crake would be like in conversation at a dinner party (except for the fact that Crake would always be very circumspect about what his actual plans were) - how would he (or Jared Diamond, or Alan Weisman) react to Crake's project and final solution.

I just noticed that Ronald Wright is talking tonight at the Seymour Theatre about his new book.