Feminism & Technology: Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy

A children’s book featuring Crake, Toby, Snowman, Zeb, and others!

Creating this project was as much a reflective process as it was a creative one. In addition to choosing a story-line, we had discussed stylistic choices, such as semantics, plot, who the writer would be (human, craker, or future craker), etc.

Choosing who the author would be is important because depending on who, there will be certain intentions in the writing style and plot. For example, if the writer was a human, they would probably imbue their writing with lessons and bias. This is similar to how Toby and Snowman don’t actually give the Crakers neutral statements or facts; Toby’s spiritual beliefs and Snowman’s familiarity with mythology heavily influence what they say to the Crakers. (I guess this would be inactive knowledge reproduction/influence?) If the writer were a Craker, they would be concerned with the facts, the history, and would explicitly mention any lessons. We agreed to have the author as a Craker, specifically one from the future. Another reason this is interesting is because over time, mythology tends to change and the differences in our stories from the novel will reflect a the affect of time passing, and also what a Craker’s interpretation events would be like.

Next, we chose a medium. We decided to mostly use collage. We assumed that if the Crakers were to create a book, they would glean the materials around them, instead of drawing. Watching my group members construct their stories was very interesting. They used different materials like tissue paper, stickers, and pop-outs. They also drew very cute pictures. Their parts flow smoothly.

For my part, I literally made collages. I found children’s books in my home, and I cut out things that were relevant to my story, or that I thought I could use. I actually cut them from some biblical story books, and Highlight magazines. Even though I had created a story prior, when making collages, the pieces that you can or cannot find can change your story. For example, I originally wanted Zeb to eat a bear, but I didn’t find enough pictures of bears in the first place. But I had enough snakes, so my original idea changed.

This whole process was very interesting to me because of a story can change depending on the resources that are around. You can’t mention too many things, or obscure things if you don’t have simple definitions (in this case, pictures) to explain it.

My part also has different versions of the characters. For example, Rev the Terror has 3-4 different variations of dog breeds. Explaining the idea of species and breeds to Crakers would be a little difficult, so having the variations identified as “Rev”, or more simply, “dog” is a very Craker-like mental process.

To construct my character, I found a few articles on tricksters in mythology and folklore. I decided to create Zeb as a self-preserving (objectivist) kind of trickster. This means he doesn’t get involved unless it benefits him. In my story, he doesn’t get involved with Rev until he is directly provoked.

I also decided to create the trickster/hero as a snake, and the villain as a dog. Dogs have always been seen in a positive light, and snakes seen as dangerous (which is true for certain snakes, but the whole Adam&Eve expulsion doesn’t help).  We are biologically programmed to not get too chummy with reptiles, but going along with the theme of the novels, I think this biology can change. The snake (and the character) don’t have to be labeled as evil; the dog may be (which makes sense with the wolvogs running around).

Overall, I really enjoyed creating this project.  I think that it was a lot of hard work and was stressful, but that’s what makes it so rewarding to be done.

Having the creative authority to make up storylines and tell the story of the Maddaddam trilogy in the eyes of a children’s folklore story was definitely a challenge.  There are a lot of components that we had to consider.

Do we call them the Crakers at all?
A: In some cases we did, just for introductory purposes, however we just shifted to using “we” and “us” to be inclusive.

How sophisticated should the drawings be?
A: We decided not at all, because if they’re just discovering art and delving into it, since Crake didn’t really make them to enjoy art, we figured their skills wouldn’t be amazing and they’d rely on pictures found.

Would they know what ____ is?
A: If it was anything technological from the 21st century, we assumed they did because they left over Humans and prospective Humakers could’ve taught them.  Also, being to into writing and possible literature, they may have seen it in books.  So we opted to keep things like computers and lightbulbs in.  Although, we did make sure to reference that it was “from chaos” or the pre-flood.

All questions like this.

This project really pushed us to think 1000 years ahead in the eyes of Crakers and potentially Humaker hybrids.  It was both a challenge and a highlight because I think the creative freedom we each got showed in the distinguishability between the four books.  Each book has a certain style that is uniquely ours.

I enjoyed this project because it let us showcase some artistic and creative abilities that we have while simultaneously putting ourselves in the mindset of Crakers and future Humakers.

Suggested Readings:

Baird, Adela; Laugharne, Janet; Maagerø, Eva; Tønnessen, Elise Seip
Children’s Literature in Education, v47 n1 p1-17 Mar 2016http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10583-015-9244-4

Purpose: The reason I’m suggesting this piece is because it focuses children’s perception to picture books.  I think this journal is relevant because it talks about children making connections between the real world and what they’re reading.

When we were making the stories, our first task was figuring how to distill all of what was to become the lore of the combined Craker and human populations after all of the characters we had grown to know and love had died. We eventually settled on picking 4 characters – Toby, Zeb, Snowman, and Crake. Each group member picked 1 character to write approximately 20 sentence-long pages about.

Although we devised our stories independently, we worked on the actual art together (for the most part). This was so we could create consistency in our visuals – whenever we draw humans, or pigoons, we followed the same style. There was some divergence in our stories (for example, Sarah’s story has no human characters: Zeb’s a snake, and the Rev is a dog), but we didn’t want things to seem like they were all written by one author. Each story is told in our own distinct voice and handwriting (sorry in advance if my handwriting’s difficult to decipher).

We also drew a lot from collaging techniques, mirroring the “gleaning” of the God’s Gardeners, as well as the post-Flood society. Luckily, Christy had a ton of stickers, which helped us add a certain childlike charm to the way we constructed our stories. I had a lot of fun making a two-page collage spread (pp. 29-30), where I used a mix of flattened dried flowers/leaves, tissue paper, and flower stickers to create the God’s Gardeners’ rooftop garden.

I drew my greatest inspiration from Aesop’s fables, because of the instructive nature of Toby’s story. There were some deviations, clearly – I chose to be very explicit with all of my morality, going for an inversion of the essential rule of “show, don’t tell.” Kind of boring, but realistically, it’s what the Crakers (and their perpetual questioning) would prefer. At one point, my story innocently glosses over the deadly fight between the MaddAddams and the remaining Painballers, with a little footnote – if you want to hear more, you can read it elsewhere. That way, I get to placate the prying Crakers, without having to include too much of that difficult-to-explain gore.

We also worked on consistency in terms of Craker lore – for instance, we decided that all characters would move to the “sky” with Oryx and Crake after death, and that Oryx and Crake would exist as humans as well as godlike figures. Since our stories take place a few generations after the events of MaddAddam, we figured some things would become codified as the combined human/Craker culture progressed.

Suggested Readings

Lawrence, Randee Lipson and Dennis Swiftdeer Paige. “What Our Ancestors Knew: Teaching and Learning through Storytelling.” New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education 149 (2016): 63-72.

This paper tracks the shifting in storytelling methods – from indigenous oral tradition (and its role as both instruction and entertainment), to classroom strategy, to fusions with visual art methods and digital storytelling. Since our stories serve as a transcription of the oral tradition started by Snowman and Toby, it’s valuable to look at the roles that storytelling plays.

Pelletier, Janette, and Ruth Beatty. “Children’s Understanding of Aesop’s Fables: Relations to Reading Comprehension and Theory of Mind.” Frontiers in Psychology 6 (2015): 1-9.

A study was conducted where 172 children (between the ages of 4 and 12) had one of Aesop’s fables read to them (the fox and the crow). The paper shows how understanding of the fable and its lesson shifts as children grow older: changing from “the story is about a fox” to “don’t get tricked.” As a writer, it’s important to think about the level of understanding that your students will have – sometimes a lesson will need to be explicitly told if you are reaching a younger audience.

Plus, a nice digital collection of Aesop’s fables from the Library of Congress, each with the moral stated clearly at the end of the story.