Wednesday, November 15, 2017

"lots of all three"

"Blood and Roses was a trading game, along the lines of Monopoly.  The Blood side played with human atrocities for the counters, atrocities on a large scale: individual rapes and murders didn't count, there had to have been a large number of people wiped out.  Massacres, genocides, that sort of thing.  The Roses side played with human achievements.  Artworks, scientific breakthroughs, stellar works of architecture, helpful inventions.  Monuments to the soul's magnificence, they were called in the game.  There were sidebar buttons, so that if you didn't know what Crime and Punishment was, or the Theory of Relativity, or the Trail of Tears, or Madame Bovary, or the Hundred Years' War, of The Flight into Egypt, you could double-click and get an illustrated rundown, in two choices: R for children, PON for Profanity, Obscenity, and Nudity.  That was the thing about history, said Crake: it had lots of all three."

-- Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

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