Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam #1)

Michael

Rating: really liked it
So, you go to Wal-Mart to buy your groceries because it's so damn cheap, but then you realize Wal-Mart is hiring very few full-time employees and not offering reasonable health care to its employees and it's walking employees through the process of how to get Medicare, not to mention they're closing down small businesses by exploiting foreign economies to get the lowest possible fucking cost; so, Wal-Mart's making YOU pay medical benefits for ITS employees, and replacing good jobs with shitty ones, and you don't want to support that, not to mention most of their food comes from the big corporations that have copyrighted their grains and are in the process of pushing small farms out of business by suing them for copyright infringement after their seeds blow onto the smaller farmer's land, so you decide to shop somewhere else, and isn't it time to go organic anyway, so you drive over to Trader Joe's and load up your cart, that feeling of guilt finally subsiding.

So you get home and you unload your reusable bags and load up the fridge and then, as you slide a boxed pizza into the freezer, you see, printed across the bottom, "Made in Italy."

So now, you're shopping for your groceries at a different store from where you do the rest of your shopping, adding to your carbon footprint, not to mention they're transporting your pizzas across half the fucking earth before they land on your shelf. So, you may not be selling out your next door neighbor, but now you're shitting a big one right on Mother Earth's face.

You head down to the local farmer's market and buy some little pygmy apples the size of clementines, and they're all weird colors but they're from some local farm, and you buy some locally made bread and buy some. . . wait, what is this? Red Bull? Doritos? All of a sudden you realize only the fruit here is local, and some of the bread, so you find another farmer across town you can buy beef from, and another farmer who you can get pork from, and now you're buying all locally, and driving all over God's red desert to get everything you need, and spending twice what you did at Wal-Mart, and spending half your saturday collecting food. Now, you're contributing to the local economy and not giving money to the giant food corporations that are trying to push small farms out of business. . . but you're still driving all over to buy the shit, and burning through petroleum like a motherfucker.

Face it: when it comes to the continuity of life on this planet, you are a pest. You're the renegade cell, eating away at all of the nice and friendly cells around you. I know I'm not telling you anything new right now: you've seen The Matrix, you've heard about overpopulation, global warming, oil spills and you know how totally, absolutely fucked polar bears are right now, but it's always been like that ever since you were born, and we keep coming up with new sciences, so inevitably something will come up to save the day, right? We'll take some polar bear DNA and store it, and once we're all caught up with Jurassic Park technologies, we'll bring 'em back. And, by the time we get to there, we'll be able to stop raising cows; we can just raise steaks: little flat cows that don't have brains, don't have needs other than maybe watering them and spooning nutrients into their slack mouths, and sea-urchin-like chicken creatures without any minds that we can make into chicken fingers, and none of them will feel a thing, so there won't be any question, ethically speaking, right? Right?

Don't hit me up with your "playing God" argument, because that's bullshit. We "play God" when we amputate a gangrenous leg, when we remove a tumor, when we brush our fucking teeth. So, what is really wrong with growing steaks in soil, and not raising cows in huge concentration camps where they hang out in their own shit all day? What's wrong with doing away with coffins, and simply mulching our loved ones? They're going in the dirt either way.

If we're being utilitarian, is our urchin-chicken happier or less happy than our chicken in a lightless pen with ridiculous pecs so oversized his legs are broken? What about the chicken who has gone mad and is now pecking other chickens to death? Probably urchin-chicken. I'm just saying.

That said, I wouldn't eat urchin-chicken, if I wanted to go out on a limb and say a company would be required to even TELL me the product I was buying was urchin: "Warning: this product is made from something that tastes like, but isn't, a chicken." They don't tell me when my steaks are cloned, or through what fucked up chemical reactions they've made my food, so I have my doubts.

What's wrong with growing a mindless food animal, much the way we grow corn or rice or soy? What's wrong with growing mindless clones of ourselves, just for the purpose of harvesting their organs? This would be an easier question to answer if I wasn't an atheist, and I could quote an instruction book, but I can't.

I have to answer the question, and I'll give an answer that Atwood kinda-does-but-doesn't: we don't know what will happen. We didn't know sea walls would increase erosion in other parts of the river when we first started building them. We didn't know that lighthouses would kill tons and tons of birds because birds fly toward the light. We didn't know that carbon emissions could be a problem until we'd flooded tons of them off into the atmosphere. So, why shouldn't we use science to make the world cater to our every desire and impulse?

Because we can't even predict the weather.




********



Oh, you want me to talk about the book? Yeah, I guess I could do that. As you can tell by my meta-review, this one gets the gears in your head turning. But, the characters were all flat and, although full of potential, ended up dull. The post-apocalyptic world we're reading about is intriguing, as are the new creatures that have replaced humans. The bizarre, freakish animals created by science are also perfectly horrific.

That said, some of this feels like a pretty big stretch. According to Atwood, we'll eventually be desensitized enough that we'll enjoy watching people tortured to death online, and we'll also like watching little children having sex with grown men. And I'm not talking about in a "2 girls 1 cup," watch-it-once-because-it-sounds-fucked-up way. . I mean, she imagines people will sit around watching this shit all the time. Perhaps I'm a prude, but I don't think either of these will ever become popular with more than a small audience. My cynicism only goes so far, I guess.

Far as dystopias go, this is an interesting and unusual one. It's also an entertaining and quick read. I wish Atwood would've invested a bit more time in filling out these characters, and given us a five-star book instead. . . but nobody bats 100%. I'm looking forward to trying some of her non-science fictiony works soon.

Tatiana

Rating: really liked it
I wonder if all Margaret Atwoods books are like this one? Having read "Oryx and Crake" and "The Handmaid's Tale," I am curious now how many other ways of horrifying me she has up her sleeve.

"Oryx and Crake" is a dystopian (or as Atwood calls it herself, a speculative fiction) novel set in a future where genetic engineering rules the world. The story is told from the POV of Snowman, a seemingly last Homo sapiens sapiens on Earth. He is surrounded by the new breed of humans - passive, docile Children of Crake who are physically flawless, void of envy and jealousy, do not understand violence or sexual drive, unable to be artistic or comprehend technology. As the story progresses, through Snowman's recollections, we gradually learn the sequence of events leading to the fall of humanity as he knew it and Snowman's own contribution to it.

The structure of the book is very similar to that of "The Handmaid's Tale." So if you liked the writing style of that book, with constant shift of tenses, past and present mingled together, you'll enjoy "Oryx and Crake" too. Once again, Atwood takes a current trend (this time it's bio/genetic engineering) and extrapolates it to an insane extent, creating a horrifying world of social disparity, violence, genetic hybrids, raging man-made viruses... The author's imagination is limitless, her command of English language is mind-blowing. This book is so much more than a science fiction novel that it so often labeled. It is a deeply philosophical book that raises numerous questions: is it wise to artificially alter something created and perfected by Nature over millions of years? does a man have a right to engineer a "perfect human" and decide who lives and who dies? or is there such a thing as a "perfect human"?

Just like "The Handmaid's Tale," the ending is uncertain. The fate of Snowman and humanity is questionable. Will the humanity survive? Will Crakers overtake? Are Crakers really what Crake intended them to be - the perfect beings? There are no answers, and I am happy there aren't. This book is not intended to tell us what is right and what is wrong, rather it makes us think about what might be...

Reading challenge: #13, 3 of 5

Emily May

Rating: really liked it
Sometimes I'm torn between wishing I could get a glimpse inside Atwood's mind and thinking that might be absolutely terrifying.

Lindsay

Rating: really liked it
This is the second dystopia Atwood has written, and I think it's less successful than The Handmaid's Tale. Her vision here is of a not-too-distant future in which the US is divided into corporate-owned gated communities where the (biotech) companies' owners and highly-paid skilled workforce live and the lawless, sprawling urban wasteland where everyone else lives.

Unlike virtually every other Atwood book I know of, the two main characters are male. The narrator, Jimmy, and his childhood friend Crake grow up inside one of the gated communities, bonding over Internet pornography and shared cynicism. As Crake grows up, it becomes evident that he is a genius, so he gets accepted to an elite science-and-technology school and drafted into a biotech firm while he's still a student. While he works there, he cooks up an apocalyptic plot to release a superbug disguised as a libido-enhancing pill once he's perfected his own synthetic race of humanoids, which he designed as an answer to everything he's identified as "wrong" with human nature. For example, the "Crakers" have photosynthetic pigment in their skins, which means they do not have to kill to eat. Crake also designed them to be cheerfully promiscuous and have obvious signals of sexual receptivity, thus eliminating conflict over sex. Crake's a real humanitarian, except for the whole "kill off Mankind 1.0" part of his plan.

Structurally, the novel suffers from being too long and taking too long for the story to move forward. Indeed, the whole thing is told in flashbacks, with Jimmy reminiscing as the Crakers pester him for stories of their creator. Atwood erred on the side of too much description in Handmaid's Tale as well, but that was a shorter novel (maybe 100 less pages than Oryx and Crake) and the society she was revealing to us was better realized.

Also, a lot of touches that were clearly meant to be satirical fall flat. One of Crake and Jimmy's favorite pastimes in youth is playing computer games, and the games Atwood comes up with are transparent attempts to shock us with the nihilism of her young antiheroes. Also, every other object in the novel is given some cutesy brand name. This is clearly an attempt to mock the corporatization of global culture, but the effect is just irritating.

None of the characters particularly register, either. Two of Atwood's trademark Elusive Women figure in this novel --- Jimmy's mother runs off while Jimmy is a preteen, for reasons we never learn, and when Jimmy meets up with Crake again when they are adults, and Crake is designing his new species, Crake has a mistress named Oryx, who never allows either man to get to know her, though she sleeps with both. The difference between these and other Elusive Women (say, Grace Marks in Alias Grace, Zenia in The Robber Bride, Joan in Lady Oracle or Marian in The Edible Woman) is that the others either revealed themselves to the reader if not to the men in their lives, or (like Zenia and Grace) gave us enough interesting possibilities that we cared to speculate as to their true natures. These women elude not only Jimmy and Crake, but also the reader.

The men, though given (many) more pages of character development, are nearly as flat. Crake is a clear instance of metaphor abuse: he is indicated to be "mildly autistic," as the college he attends is nicknamed Asperger's U. and he disparages his old high school as containing "wall-to-wall neurotypicals." As his autism never appears in his behavior or becomes relevant to the story (indeed, it is never mentioned except in the chapter titled "Asperger's U."), I suspect it was only brought up to underscore the single salient point of his character, which is his detachment from the rest of the human species. The sole salient point of Jimmy's character seems to be that he is not Crake.

BlackOxford

Rating: really liked it
One Generation Away

I find it difficult to tell whether Atwood’s dystopian fantasies are meant as constructive social criticism or as sarcastic prophecy. Recent headlines suggest that her prophetic skills dominate, and with them her anticipatory sarcasm.

In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the MeToo movement, for example, the British actress Joanna Lumley is reported to be fervently hoping that “not all men are bad” [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainm...]. As Spencer Tracey said in the 1955 film, Inherit the Wind, when told by the trial judge in the Scopes monkey case that he hoped that Tracey wasn’t mocking the court, “Your Honor has every right to hope.” So, no Joanna, it’s hard to find a good one; but please go on hoping.

I think it’s fair to say that there is little hope for males in Oryx and Crake. Certainly not for the protagonists of Jimmy/Snowman nor the eponymous Crake who are both thoroughly misogynistic from puberty onwards. They humiliate females in their fascination with kiddie-porn and their fantasy of women as either saints or incompetents. But the oblique references to male oppressors goes far beyond the characters of the story. If I interpret Atwood correctly, she includes Adam Smith, Moses, Freud, Darwin, Gandhi, and perhaps even the genetic scientists Watson and Crick as symbols of a male-dominated corporatocracy.

And she’s undoubtedly right: The XY genetic make-up is clearly defective. After all how does one otherwise explain the recent tragedy in Toronto in which ten people were killed and another fifteen seriously injured [https://www.thelily.com/who-are-incel...]? This insane atrocity was carried out by a so-called ‘incel’, that is, an involuntarily celibate male. His murderous grievance was against women because they found him sexually unattractive. His considered strategy for revenge was random homicide by motor vehicle. One such nut-case would be embarrassing for man-kind; but it is reported that more than 40,000 men subscribe to a Facebook account which promotes an Incel Movement.

Atwood’s anticipation of the Incels is remarkable. Crake is a Jim Jones-type of scientific genius who is responsible for a world-wide genetic make-over. Part of the Crakian genetic re-design for humanity - thereby creating the ‘children of Crake’ - is the ritualization of sexual activity so that males don’t feel bad when rejected by prospective female mates. Otherwise the world would continue to be plagued by “... the single man at the window, drinking himself into oblivion to the mournful strains of the tango. But such things could escalate into violence. Extreme emotions could be lethal. If I can’t have you nobody will, and so forth. Death could set in.”

As a solution, the losers in courtship rituals in Crake’s new world immediately lose all sexual desire - as well as their glowing blue penises - as soon as they receive the negative news. Men are pigs and are in need of fundamental reconstruction in other words - even by their own assessment.

Or more accurately, men are ‘pigoons’ according to Atwood’s story-line. Pigoons are one of the many new species created by modern genetic ‘splicing’. In this case: of pigs and raccoons. Other varieties include rakunks, snats, wolvogs, bobkittens, spoat/ giders, and rabbits that glow with the genes of jellyfish. These invasive and predatory animals are mis-attributed as the ‘Children of Oryx’. This is another misogynistic swipe since Oryx is an Asian girl sold into slavery who becomes both a porn-star and Jimmy’s feminine muse (a dig at Jung?) whenever he has enough booze to stimulate alcoholic hallucinations.

One might think that Atwood’s literary reach might have exceeded her intellectual grasp in conceiving such strange creatures as pigoons. But in today’s news appears the astounding announcement that pigs’ brains are now being kept alive outside their bodies [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetec...]. The scientists involved (apparently all of them men) believe that it is possible to repeat this remarkable feat with any mammal. And that, therefore, inter-species splicing is indeed feasible. Human immortality, some believe, is at hand. The children of Crake indeed: “... human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else, some new version of themselves, and live on forever.”

It is not just their genes that are questionable. Male minds are philosophically harmful in their rationalization of male power as beneficial in an Invisible Hand sort of way. The benign logic of competitive personal ambition - for advancement, for reputation, for wealth, for making the world better - is a mere excuse for power-seeking. The male mind is warped in its essential isolationism: “He [Jimmy] wanted to be himself, alone, unique, self-created and self-sufficient.”

The quest for power ensures only one thing: an increase in the destructiveness of power. Another way of saying the same thing: an increase in power requires exploitation - of the environment, of animals, and of other people, particularly of women. Someone or something always loses in the competitive hormonal struggle. “Crake made the Great Emptiness,” say the men.

The zero-sum game in the male-dominated world is enshrined by the children of Crake in its creational mythology:

“Crake made the bones of the Children of Crake out of the coral on the beach, and then he made their flesh out of a mango. But the Children of Oryx hatched out of an egg, a giant egg laid by Oryx herself. Actually she laid two eggs: one full of animals and birds and fish, and the other one full of words. But the egg full of words hatched first, and the Children of Crake had already been created by then, and they’d eaten up all the words because they were hungry, and so there were no words left over when the second egg hatched out. And that is why the animals can’t talk.”

Crake, in other words, not only eliminated sexual rivalry, he also destroyed the possibility of intelligent conversation. Even Jimmy, his disciple and quondam advertising copywriter, recognizes the profundity of the loss: ‘“Hang on to the words,” he tells himself. The odd words, the old words, the rare ones. Valance. Norn. Serendipity. Pibroch. Lubricious. When they’re gone out of his head, these words, they’ll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.”’

Crake’s debasing of language is actually part of an ideology: “The whole world is now one vast uncontrolled experiment – the way it always was, Crake would have said – and the doctrine of unintended consequences is in full spate.” This ideology is, I think, the central theme of Oryx and Crake. It is an ideology of chaos, of irrational rationalistic inquiry and technological development, an ideology which conforms to the competitive, driven strangeness of masculine ‘nature’.

The latest headlines from California about Bill Cosby’s conviction make it difficult to disagree with Atwood at any point. [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/artic...].

Sean Barrs

Rating: really liked it
Oryx and Crake is an exceptionally weird novel that left me baffled, stunned and even disgusted; however, as time went on, it developed into one of the cleverest pieces of fiction I have ever read.

Behind the child pornography, ritualistic killings and animal abuse two young teens relished watching in their spare time on the internet, resided a dormant drive to understanding the excesses of human behaviour in order to dominate it. One of the boys (Crake) is phased by nothing; he is cold, calculating and utterly detached from the passions most people experience. He watches such sick things in order to understand humanity in all its dark and gruesome facets. His best friend, Jimmy, is lead along due to his loneliness and curiosity. His personality is overshadowed by that of his more intelligent friend’s. And what they discover together drives Crake onto a very dark and dangerous road.

But why? What’s Crake’s endgame? I couldn’t have guessed until the end. I was sure something big was coming, but I wasn’t expecting something quite as radical as what we got. The set-up for it is massive. I’m currently reading the book for a second time, and I can see all the early warning signs of what’s to come. If I’m being a little bit cryptic here, it’s because I don’t want to land a massive spoiler in your lap. The point is, Atwood has done something exceedingly clever in these pages. And I can’t wait to see where she takes it in the rest of the trilogy. There are so many themes she can address and so many interesting places she can take this.

This is a difficult novel to read in places because it depicts some truly horrible things, but I urge you to look beyond such representations and consider what Atwood was trying to say. It’s worth listening to. And as much as I love The Handmaid’s Tale I would go as far to say that this is a much more accomplished novel. It doesn’t have any feminist qualities, though instead it turns its critical eye towards issue of survival for humanity in a world on the cusp of environmental and economic collapse. It’s on par with 1984 and Brave New World with its subversive qualities and imaginative representation of a future that is not too far from reality.

At times it reminded me of Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go with its depiction of depressed youth in a world the characters cannot fully navigate as they chose to suppress memories and ideas. Oryx is the prime example, but the limiting factor of the novel is its protagonist Jimmy. Jimmy is quite stationary and flat as a character. I hope he progresses in later books as here his experiences are vanilla when compared to what Oryx and Crake have. He felt like a means to tell their story, a mere narrative device, so I’m hoping (given how this novel ends) he starts to take a stronger grasp on the story and infuses it with a sense of ownership.

Time will tell, for now this a great book full of great ideas. And potentially, depending how Atwood uses them in the rest of the trilogy, it could be one of the best dystopian fictions ever written.

MaddAddam Trilogy
1. Oryx and Crake - 5 stars
2. The Year of the Flood - 5 stars
3. MaddAddam - 2 stars



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Rebecca

Rating: really liked it
I am calling complete, and total, bullshit.

There are so many things wrong with this book that it's hard to know where to begin. For starters, the idea of having a couple of different timelines going at once, and shift tenses according--present tense for the present, regular past tenses for the past--causes some serious grammatical problems, and is an utter BS plot device. I'm not a huge fan of telling a story through flashbacks, but it can be done reasonably while retaining proper grammar. It's not brain surgery.

I admit that I went into this book predisposed not to like it, for a variety of reasons. I didn't like The Blind Assassin (yes, I might be the only person IN THE WORLD who can say that), but I thought that I should be fair and give an author another chance before I make up my mind. I also generally dislike dystopic literature, because it's so rarely done right. Her basic idea was kind of interesting (if done better in Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, and even that had its problems), but the execution was fatally flawed. I don't know much about science, but I do know that some of the research was wrong and the timelines don't add up. She seemed like she researched just enough to be able to throw words around, but not enough to use them correctly--a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. The biggest problem was the characters, though: three such utterly unsympathetic main characters do not make it easy to like anything about the story. Crake was a rabid dog that needed to be put down a lot sooner than he was, Oryx was probably insane and too cold to make you care, and Snowman was just too damn stupid. Also, characters that you meet while they're watching child porn to me means that they should be first in line for the electric chair, not that I should care about their personal problems.

The biggest problem I have with Atwood, though, is a problem that seems to be systemic in her works: she's so bloody arrogant. When you open one of her books, you're immediately hit in the face by a thought bubble: She is writing World Changing Literature, and you should grovel before her genius. You have to dig through layers of ego just to get to the plot. She has talent, no doubt, but she is so full of herself and her ability to be a Literary Writer that you miss the book forest for the literary trees.

Also-also, she probably thought that ending was clever, but it was, in fact, a cop out. She was bored with the book, she wanted to end it, so she did. It must be convenient to not have to actually tie up her loose ends.

In summary, I am clearly too much of a plebeian to appreciate the full extent of her genius, and I should crawl back to the benighted hole from whence I came.

Will Byrnes

Rating: really liked it


I had read Year of the Flood not realizing that it was a sequel to Oryx and Crake. Thus a desire to see what else was in store in this post-apocalyptic vision. Atwood portrays a world in which short-sightedness causes a major, global collapse in civilization. We travel with a few characters through the transition from bad to unimaginable and see what might happen if we continue along some of the paths we now trod. Genetic engineering is at the core here, and along with it flows a consideration of what it means to be human. Are the highly engineered tribe of innocents still human? Are pigs with human brain elements at least partly people? Where should lines be drawn in our capacity to modify reality? Classic questions of the genre, for sure. The if-this-goes-on notion extends to political and security issues as well as scientific ones.

I felt at times that the book was addressed to a young audience, maybe a cut above YA. That stems at least in part on the story's focus on young characters. It was a very quick, engaging read. I liked the book and it addresses real issues. Having read two in the series, I am looking forward to a promised third.


December 5,2019 - Daily Beast - Feral Hogs Terrorize Senior Citizens in Texas - by Tracy Connor - Makes one wonder

Annet

Rating: really liked it
How can someone make up such a fascinating and terrifying story? Wow.... I absolutely loved it. It took me some time to take this book from my book shelves, it was there already some time, it seemed a bit weird, but after having read the Handmaid's Tale, I took up the challenge and it was well, well worthed. An apocalyptic story about a guy who seems to have remained as the sole human alive after an epidemic catastrophy leading to mankind going down. Together with the weird Crake's children he survives and it's tough. The story alternates beween his youth and past and the apocalyptic world in which he has to survive and the story leads up slowly to the events that lead to the catastrophy. Highly recommended and highly fascinating. It took me some time to read it as I did not have much time to read, but every page was worthed and it was even worthwhile taking everything in intensively in stead of reading fast.
I am now officially a big fan of Margaret Atwood and looking forward to read the sequel.

Fabian

Rating: really liked it
What a fantastic dystopia awaits! Our post-apocalyptic fate will surely be a wonder to behold. Atwood BUILDS UP when any other 'sensible' writer writing today about the doomed future would simply TEAR DOWN. In this compulsively-readable novel, the fabulous formula borrows some ingredients from such classic books as "The Island of Dr. Moreau"& "Jurassic Park"; "The Road" and "Never Let Me Go*" derive from the same line of thought as it! It's basically SUPERIOR to all of those books (save, maybe, the fourth*) & in bringing so much imagination to the forefront it gives us good evidence that great, lasting literature does not have to be boring. Inventing a Whole New World, creating an Origin tale, establishing a stream of consciousness which gives up to the reader enough clues to continue on his way to unravel the secret at the center of the novel (Who is the elusive Oryx? Who is the mysterious Crake?). Miss Atwood does it all, & not a single page disappoints. Seriously. Here is a rare example of chaos being handled with expert skill.

It is WAY more accessible, it should be mentioned, than the often-(over)praised "Handmaid's Tale", which is as feminist a tale as this modern novel is humanist. (Individualism of the 80's in strict contrast with the Globalization of the 10's). Animal hybrids and new species are invented, as are whole new words and classification systems. Atwood is intrepid in the creation of this fun, original terrain, which is in itself a theme of the novel (!!) And let's not forget to mention a fresh plot, heavy with allegory but also as effortless as air, in both the elements of comedy and surprise. It is a book as exotic as any blue-assed member of the Children of Crake.

J.L. Sutton

Rating: really liked it


Most Recent Reading (3/6/2020)
Again, absolutely amazing! And I loved it even more after reading The Year of the Flood!

Even though Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake was absolutely amazing, it took me a few readings before I was ready to review it. Like many of her other novels, Atwood presents events leading up to her dystopian future with a cold logic. How the characters participate in these events as well as the world of the 'crakers' (which comes after humanity) makes this story truly memorable. It can be a little difficult following events in the beginning; however, it is well worth the effort. Atwood's stories have a lyrical quality which really fits the new mythology which is being created in her new world. Her character's transformations are equally compelling. I will be rereading this book and reading the rest of the trilogy.

karen

Rating: really liked it
eh.

bore-x and crake. this is a very all right book. i was just unwowed by it. initially, i liked the pacing of the book, and the way the story was spooling out between the present and past, doling its secrets out in dribs and drabs. but the characters just seemed so flimsy, and i was ultimately left with more questions than explanations. and the cutesy futuristic products and consumer culture bits are best left in the hands of a george saunders, not the queen of the long pen. however - and this maybe counts as a spoiler, but its just a minor plot point that is revealed somewhere in the middle and its not like - "oh - she has a dick!" or "they were dead the whole time", so i say it does not qualify. but riding the train to school today, i understood the potential value for pills given to the public that they would think were to improve their sex lives but were secretly sterilizing them. the thirty or so teenagers that plowed into the train screaming and carousing who then decided that the crowded subway was the best place to get into a full-on hair pulling bitchslap fight cannot be allowed to breed. please give us those pills, geneticists... i will bake you a delicious raspberry pie.

come to my blog!

Baba

Rating: really liked it
2016 review One of my all-time favourite constructed realities and on second reading still as good! The author and the series that coined the words 'speculative fiction' in which a story is set on modern day Earth but where the history is slightly or sometimes, hugely different. That a literary writer could create such a well thought out, yet very real feeling with this 'what if business and business interests become more powerful than states?' reality is extremely impressive... but not to make things easier Atwood then has virtually the entire book and indeed the trilogy as massively character-led. Words cannot express how much I enjoy reading this immensely original, innovative and damning dystopia. 9.5 out of 12.

2010 review Another highly accessible and exceptional piece of 'speculative fiction' by Atwood… one that is well deserved of the Man Booker shortlisting it received. A dystopian tale told from the viewpoint of the lifelong friend of one of the world' greatest scientific minds Crake, and a woman they are both obsessed with from their youth, after seeing her on a pornographic website Oryx. The tale shows how these three people's lives impact on the entire world. The beauty of this book is how Atwood creates a believable world where capitalism has run amok alongside bio-genetics and bio-chemistry, where man has attempted to totally subjugate nature with science (especially genetics) primarily to create money and power. A wondrous tale by Atwood, who in the space of three books I have read of hers, has blasted into my top ten authors. 8 out of 12

Julie G

Rating: really liked it
It's the end of the world as we know it

It's the end of the world as we know it

It's the end of the world as we know it

and Jimmy feels fine.

Jimmy feels fine.

Actually, wait. That's not true. It's the end of the world, and Jimmy's the last human standing and he feels. . . he feels. . . well, Jimmy feels like shit.

He's wrapped in a bed sheet, he's filthy, he's hungry, and he's alone, with nothing but his worries, his regrets and some strange non-humans, known as Crakers, to keep him company.

And why is Jimmy, the B student, the sex addicted playboy, the wordsmith, the Everyman, still alive? Why should HE still exist while almost everyone else has perished?

Well, he had the jackal position and the trust of a madman, known as Crake, and was therefore favored in the end, when Crake's one man show brought the world down.

And as the famous Margaret Mead once said:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

Yes, Margaret. . . all groups good, and bad, am I right?

This book is a great reminder to beware the despots (know any?), the disgruntled and/or depressed. . . oh, and BIG CORPORATIONS.

There is no madness here that seems a spoof, and dear Ms. Atwood confirms for us at the end of the entire trilogy (this is book #1), that all of the science in her fiction trilogy has a solid basis in truth. Be afraid, people. Be very afraid.

This is dystopian fiction, set not too far in the distant future, and, as always, Ms. Atwood gives us a character who is so real, he appears to have DNA.

Her side characters are surprisingly unformed (there's far more meat overall on the bones of books 2 and 3), but this is the beginning and it's Jimmy's story, and his well-developed self and the unbelievably quotable quality of this story bumped it up to 5 stars for me in this, my re-read.

Oh Jimmy!

Ms. Atwood, who is a literary oracle as far as I'm concerned, doesn't preach to us, just reports:

There are too many people and that makes people bad.

For shit sure, Margaret.

In goddess we trust.

Leonard Gaya

Rating: really liked it
Margaret Atwood once reported that, when she was a child, many discussions at the dinner table revolved around climate warming, extinction of species, and other similar topics that are nowadays on the front cover of magazines. Oryx and Crake, in the same vein as The Handmaid's Tale, is a novel that speculates about the near future of humanity.

What if social disparities were no longer fought against but admitted and institutionalised as a form of urbanism, such as fancy gated communities, next to impoverished and crime-infested neighbourhoods? What if we genetically engineered animals on a similar scale as what is now usual for crops? What if drugs that increase sexual appetite while smothering violent impulses were available everywhere? What if we started engineering viruses for biological warfare? Some of these questions are no longer just speculations.

Margaret Atwood, with her satirical humour and her sophisticated prose, develops these concerns throughout this novel. The narrative is a bit slow and perplexing at first. On the one hand, Snowman’s story inside a post-apocalyptic landscape; on the other hand, Jimmy and Glenn’s teen years playing video games and watching porn or snuff videos. Later, as the novel progresses, things gradually come together. But the primary payoff lies in the last hundred pages of the book. At that point, as in The Handmaid's Tale, the narrative takes a biblical turn: Atwood provides a parody of the fall of man, cast out from the Garden of Eden (see the Book of Genesis), with Crake standing for Yahweh and the post-human Crackers playing a comical version of Adam and Eve. One may also think of it as a parody of the Gospel: a Christlike Snowman making up ridiculous answers to the existential questions of his Crakers disciples.

Atwood is a brilliant writer who demands a keen and patient reader. It is also possible that she was already thinking about writing The MaddAddam Trilogy, of which Oryx and Crake is the first installment, and paced her novel accordingly, leaving an open ending. She is also surprisingly convincing when writing for Jimmy / Snowman, the young male protagonist.