Page 100 to 200 Thoughts and Information

Perry 1

Isaac Perry

Mrs. Vallier

ENG 4U

Sunday, Jan 7th/’11

            This hundred page interval drags on a bit because it is setting up connections and informing the reader about different parts of the characters lives’ that do not have a great impact on the story but is needed to explain how they ended up in their current positions. I was however able to glean a few things from it.

1)         Oryx is has gone through a lot in her life. She was born in a seemingly third world country where she lived in a “village with trees all around and fields nearby, or possibly rice paddies” (115). “This village was a place where everyone was poor and there were many children” which lead to them resorting to selling off some of the children whenever there was an offer for them. Once her father had died there was no more income for the large family, so “then the raw materials of life had to come from somewhere else” (116). A man came for her and the others he bought, he “was the same man who always came” (117). All the kids he bought went with this man across the world to his mansion in the city. From here they were used as street venders and child porn actors. She was eventually sold to wealthy man as a servant. This took place for a while before she was taken away in a police raid.

            This story of Oryx's childhood takes up about 40 pages which is a long time to be in a single time period for this book. This could be to get across how much snowman thinks about her and the trials she faced during her life.

2)         As Snowman considers his options in terms of available resources, he decides he should go back to the bubble-dome (code name: Paradice) where he apparently was a guard. This doesn't seem odd at first, but then a voice in his head starts to whisper “You don't want to go back there, do you?” (152). This gives a creepy impression of Paradice, and makes me wonder what had happened there.

3)         The theme of the book seems to be shifting more towards warning of the chaos science can bring about. An example of this comes in a memory Snowman has of the time bobkittens were introduced to the wild. “They were supposed to eliminate feral cats, thus improving the almost non-existent songbird population. The bobkittens wouldn’t bother much about the birds, as they would lack the lightness and agility necessary to catch them” (164). The animal did end up leaving the songbirds alone, but soon after their release “small dogs went missing from backyards, babies from prams; short joggers were mauled” (164).

The point behind the stories of different human creations is that they all have consequences. They make something to serve one purpose but it ends up creating more problems than it solved. Unfortunately society is not learning from these mistakes and continuously fixes the problem they created the same way it was brought about. This creates a never ending cycle that makes the people creating these things rich and the ones buying them poor.