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Loading... Oryx and Crakeby Margaret Atwood
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. lnr_blair | Jul 7, 2009 |   Frightful, frightful, frightful, gloomy, frightful, frightful, depressingly perverted, frightful. (  )Sandydog1 | Jul 3, 2009 | My most unfavourite Atwood book, and she's among my favourite authors! (  )livrecache | Jun 27, 2009 | I really enjoyed this book and am always surprised by how many different types/genres of novels Margaret Atwood can carry out, each with perfection. I'm not that familiar with dystopic lit, but this seemed creative, almost funny in parts, thoguht-provoking, and had a touch of human compassion. It was a fast can't-put-it-down read. (  )technodiabla | May 19, 2009 | I normally avoid Atwood's works because she's so... lecture-y. This book starts off with clean and crisp writing that snaps you right into the story, makes you wonder what's going on. Both the pre-apocalypse and post-apocalypse worlds she creates are believable and scary (and very male) but at some point around 4/5 of the way through, it seems that Atwood lost her place. The last part of the story feels very rushed - it seems, almost, that Atwood realized she had 75 pages left but had all these "morals" she still wanted to impart so she packed them all in at the end. So while it starts off at a nice crisp pace, the end feels compacted and was a great disappointment. ( )crazybatcow | May 13, 2009 | 0.039 seconds to build listing 
 Set sometime in the future, this post-apocalyptic novel takes scientific research in the hands of madmen to its logical and frightening conclusion. Inspiring readers to pay more attention to the world around them, Atwood offers cautionary notes about the environment, bioengineering, the sacrifice of civil liberties, and the possible loss of those human values which make life more than just a physical experience. As the novel opens, some catastrophe has occurred, effectively wiping out human life. Only one lonely survivor and a handful of genetically altered humanoids remain, and they are slowly starving as they try to adjust to their changed circumstances. In Margaret Atwood's first attempt at writing a novel, the main character was an ant swept downriver on a raft. She abandoned that book after the opening scene and became caught up in other activities, which she has described as ''sissy stuff like knitting and dresses and stuffed bunnies.'' That certainly does not sound like Ms. Atwood, who is known for the boldness of her fiction. Of course she was only 7 at the time.  Margaret Atwood has always taken a jaundiced view of human nature. Back when her mordant observations about marriage and other relations between the sexes had her marked down as a feminist, she took pains to fire off several novels in a row featuring weak, manipulative, dishonest and outright bad women, partly to prove that her skepticism was distributed fairly. She has always been of the opinion that people are a mixed bag of the occasionally decent and the frequently mendacious and that there's not much anyone can do to change that fact. Genetic tinkering. Rampant profiteering. A deadly virus that sweeps the globe. Are these last Tuesday's headlines or our future? In Margaret Atwood's novel Oryx and Crake, the answer is both. For Atwood, our future is the catastrophic sum of our oversights. It's a depressing view, saved only by Atwood's biting, black humor and absorbing storytelling. he novelist Margaret Atwood has wandered off from us before: once, in 1986, to the mid-twenty-first century, for a feminist dystopia, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” in which women are enslaved according to their reproductive usefulness; another time, in 1996, to the nineteenth century, to make thrifty use of her graduate work at Radcliffe in the faux-Victorian novel “Alias Grace.” These were forays and raids. In her chronicling of contemporary sexual manners and politics, Atwood has always been interested in pilfering popular forms—comic books, gothic tales, detective novels, science fiction—in order to make them do her more literary bidding. Her previous novel, “The Blind Assassin,” is the best example of the kind of narrative pastiche at which she excels.
Amazon.com (ISBN 0385721676, Paperback)In Oryx and Crake, a science fiction novel that is more Swift than Heinlein, more cautionary tale than "fictional science" (no flying cars here), Margaret Atwood depicts a near-future world that turns from the merely horrible to the horrific, from a fool's paradise to a bio-wasteland. Snowman (a man once known as Jimmy) sleeps in a tree and just might be the only human left on our devastated planet. He is not entirely alone, however, as he considers himself the shepherd of a group of experimental, human-like creatures called the Children of Crake. As he scavenges and tends to his insect bites, Snowman recalls in flashbacks how the world fell apart.While the story begins with a rather ponderous set-up of what has become a clichéd landscape of the human endgame, littered with smashed computers and abandoned buildings, it takes on life when Snowman recalls his boyhood meeting with his best friend Crake: "Crake had a thing about him even then.... He generated awe ... in his dark laconic clothing." A dangerous genius, Crake is the book's most intriguing character. Crake and Jimmy live with all the other smart, rich people in the Compounds--gated company towns owned by biotech corporations. (Ordinary folks are kept outside the gates in the chaotic "pleeblands.") Meanwhile, beautiful Oryx, raised as a child prostitute in Southeast Asia, finds her way to the West and meets Crake and Jimmy, setting up an inevitable love triangle. Eventually Crake's experiments in bioengineering cause humanity's shockingly quick demise (with uncanny echoes of SARS, ebola, and mad cow disease), leaving Snowman to try to pick up the pieces. There are a few speed bumps along the way, including some clunky dialogue and heavy-handed symbols such as Snowman's broken watch, but once the bleak narrative gets moving, as Snowman sets out in search of the laboratory that seeded the world's destruction, it clips along at a good pace, with a healthy dose of wry humor. --Mark Frutkin, Amazon.ca (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:19 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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I don't know what else to say. Atwood writes post-apocalyptic future as well as she does present-day and past. It reaches out and grabs you and sucks you in and you don't want to put it down. I loved this, and didn't want it to end.
Some day I'll learn to write reviews properly and be able to tell you what the flaws in this are, and *why* you should like it, but for now this will have to do. (