I began reading the Hugo and Nebula winning novel The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi the same day as an article appeared on Yahoo! about genetically modified salmon. Creepy. Very, very creepy. The Windup Girl is an incredible novel, well deserving of every award it has received. But I didn’t enjoy reading it. It made me feel too vulnerable. The novel is just too plausible. Many people are mistrustful or at least a bit skeptical of the motivation of large food companies. Our recent tainted egg scare is just one in a series of examples. Many people don’t trust government agencies to always hold people’s best interests in mind. Bacigalupi extrapolates a dark future based on those ideas. I usually am not paranoid, and I actually think genetic engineering has the potential to do a great deal of good for some serious conditions: diabetes, inherited cancers, spinal injuries. Like many things, it also has the potential to do devastating harm.
I need to lighten up a bit before I am ready to look at some of my bookmarks.
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