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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. 1   littlebookworm | Nov 5, 2009 |  love, dystopia, apocalypse, climate change, genetic engineering (  ) mckATclc | Nov 3, 2009 | An amazing work. The story is intriguing and draws you in moment by moment. I do have to say that I really didn't like any of the characters though. It does not detract from the quality of the book at all. A good book makes you feel something or think about something...and I felt all throughout this book. Atwood's version of the world presented in this book is scary and horrifying. The wealthy live in protected communities and create, regulate, and market everything to the pleebs....Horrifying and so scary. I did not find the characters likable and kind of wish that they had all gotten sick with the contagion, but that is just me...the story could not have been told in the same manner. Amazing! The only reason that I did not rate the book 5 stars was because I would have liked one redeemable character. (  ) bookwormteri | Oct 22, 2009 | Interesting, illuminating, and very bizarre. It's a gentle, hypnotic dystopia painted with occasional garish strokes. My one complaint is that the "Everyman" role is not Everyman at all, but man with all of a man's worse foibles. It's not an elevating piece, but rather a sobering one of the mindset of the present majority. furius | Oct 21, 2009 | "Oryx and Crake" is a novel of a terrifyingly plausible near future where the human race is gone (save for one man) and genetically engineered creatures run free. Snowman, the last surviving human, watches over a band of "Crakers", genetically modified human-like beings who have been designed to be perfect. Spliced creatures like wolvogs, rakunks, and pigoons have gone feral. Snowman's memories show how this world came to be. Those memories alternate with descriptions of what the world has become. Atwood, has always, writes of the future in a way that is entirely believable and thought-provoking. I could easily believe that Snowman's world evolved from ours, much more so than when I first read the book a few years ago. The characters can leave a little to be desired, but Atwood's ideas more than make up for it. I hope that "The Year of the Flood", which I have heard is sort of a sequel, can live up to it. ( ) Abbyroad909 | Oct 5, 2009 | 
 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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This is only my second Margaret Atwood novel, and after loving The Handmaid’s Tale, I’m really wondering why it took me so long to read another. I adore dystopias and Atwood has created another intriguing world here, if not quite as plausible. When Jimmy was a child, the Corporations ruled supreme, essentially acting as one big government. The world outside of the Corporations was unimportant, the people only used as test subjects and cash cows as medicines were infused with illnesses to keep the market booming. If any worker betrayed insider secrets, they were killed. This was the world of Jimmy’s childhood, and while he wasn’t brilliant enough for a high position, his best friend Glenn, later known as Crake, certainly was. It is Crake who sets out to change everything and puts in motion the events that destroy the world as everyone knows it.
While I couldn’t say I actually liked any of the characters, which was the book’s weakest point, it was hard for me to tear myself away from this book. I was fascinated by the development of the plot; we know early on that the world has changed drastically, but finding out just how and why was riveting. I didn’t like Jimmy/Snowman all that much, due to his escapades with women and his irritating obsession with Oryx, but I loved the curiosities of his world. His struggle to find more food allows us to relate to him even as we dislike him, but it also serves the purpose of guiding us through more of the world.
For me, the best part was the Crakers, the genetically altered beings that Crake created. What I liked about them was that even though they were modified to escape supposed human foibles, they still exhibited that humanity. This was mainly through their acceptance of a god-like story featuring, as expected, Oryx and Crake. Even though they’re reportedly hard-wired to miss out on all mistakes, they are still people and it’s almost as though we can see their mythology evolving. Snowman doesn’t know how else to explain it to them and they latch on remarkably easily. Fascinating stuff, and that really cemented the entire book for me.
Atwood is a remarkable author. Oryx and Crake has convinced me that I really need to get reading more of her work. I certainly recommend this, especially to those who enjoy dystopias and science fiction. (