From Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, "An Orison of Sonmi-451" is perhaps the most disturbing story for self-conscious citizens or denizens of the contemporary world. Mitchell substitutes terms such as "movie" and "shoe" into "disney" and "nike" unapologetically. He also substitutes corporation names for social sectors - "exxon" for "oil plants," for instance. The result is a story thoroughly told from within the linguistic environment of what Mitchell calls "corpocracy."
The story speaks for itself, so I will not go into its synopsis nor its general "moral" lessons. I do think worth noting here that this ought to be the first story to be read in the entire book. The story is split into two parts, which ought to be read successively. Proceed then to "The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish." This, again, is split into two, which again ought to be read successively. In this manner the six stories first must be read, before re-reading the entire book according to its own order. Trying to read it from front to back on the first attempt is very, very challenging, perhaps even impossible.
"An Orison" is such a beautiful and powerful story, with no word wasted, that it painfully brings out - well beyond the limits of the morally palpable - the reality (there is no other word for it) of contemporary culture. Again, it would be futile to try and articulate this "reality" outside the flow of the story itself. It is only after fully appreciating the aesthetic force of "An Orison" that readers are able to read the next story without lapsing into the habit of searching for the simple story behind the "pretentious" words. The words are not pretentious at all. They are necessary, in order to re-present what is otherwise buried or made invisible in ordinary speech. Exactly what this implicit "reality" of our contemporary culture is can only be made visible through the experience of Mitchell's new language.
Once readers are tuned into the flow of Mitchell's idiom, its lucidity and eloquence becomes fairly apparent, and the new world which it paints crystallizes into a concept - which awaits renewed articulation - thanks to Mitchell's aesthetic rigor.
