Good moralistic sci-fi satire from Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. This book has been an eery trip, very cold and numb, and depressing… yet funny. This passage gives you the flavor.
When did the body first set out on its own adventures? Snowman thinks; after having ditched its old travelling companions, the mind and the soul, for whom it had once been considered a mere corrupt vessel or else a puppet acting out their dramas for them, or else bad company, leading the other two astray. It must have got tired of the soul’s constant nagging and whining and the anxiety-driven intellectual web-spinning of the mind, distracting it whenever it was getting its teeth into something juicy or its fingers into something good. It had dumped the other two back there somewhere, leaving them stranded in some damp sanctuary or stuffy lecture hall while it made a beeline for the topless bars, and it had dumped culture along with them: music and painting and poetry and plays. Sublimation, all of it; nothing but sublimation according to the body. Why not cut to the chase?
But the body had its own cultural forms. It had its own art. Executions were its tragedies, pornography was its romance.
My personal favorite brand name was Chickenobs Bucket O’Nubbins.
I thought the description of those things was really nasty… picture a chicken in the form of a sea anemone with the brain of a hookworm. Just a tiny mouth in the center of an array of wings and parts where you put the food.
Yummy.