In an earlier post I wrote about the Sonmi 451 chapters of the book, which describe a dystopian future and genetically-engineered "fabricants":
My vote for best recent dystopian fiction featuring genetic engineering goes to the An Orison Of Sonmi 451 chapters of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Can't wait to see the big budget movie. Will they retain the Korean peninsula setting?The trailer is visually beautiful, but the complexity of the plot might be challenging for most viewers.
Honorable mention: Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake.
From the book:
Popular wisdom has it that fabricants don’t have personalities. This fallacy is propagated for the comfort of purebloods.
“Comfort”? How do you mean? To enslave an individual troubles your consciences, Archivist, but to enslave a clone is no more troubling than owning the latest six-wheeler ford, ethically. Because you cannot discern our differences, you believe we have none. But make no mistake: even same-stem fabricants cultured in the same wombtank are as singular as snowflakes. ...
Did your second day outside provide any answers? Some: but yet more surprises. The first stood across the anteroom from my cot as I awoke. A pylonic man, over three meters tall and dressed in an orange zipsuit, was studying the bookshelves. His face, neck, and hands were scalded red, burnt black, and patched pale, but he did not seem to suffer pain. His collar confirmed he was a fabricant, but I could not guess his stemtype: lips genomed out, ears protected by hornvalves, and a voice deeper than any I heard before or since. ...
4 comments:
I think the Wachowski brothers were drawn to the BDSM undercurrents of the book's obsession with power differentials, exploitation, etc.
They changed the eyecolor of the Sonmi model. Hm.
The Wachowskis tend to innovate on their templates a lot, but I don't recall them ever actually changing the setting country. And seeing that Hae-Joo Im seems to be an asian dude (or are they both eurasian?), there is hope that I'm going to see my favorite character, Wing 027, the way I imagined him.
Nope, he's played by a white actor, Jim Sturgess. Typical.
If you look at the trailer, he's SFX'ed to change his ethnicity to some kind of asian. Keep in mind, the same actor plays two rebirths with two different ethnicities (part of the whole cyclical reincarnation thing). But the Hae-Joo Im i seems to be depicted as a native of Nea So Copros, rather than as a white dude.
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