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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. Taking place in a not so distant future scape, Atwood presents a strange and cold world. One of the parts of the book that alarmed me and has stuck with me most was the entertainment in this future world. Atwood presents this shocking concept of 24 hour live feeds for different interests including a rape channel. But then I realize with the transition in entertainment to reality TV and why we have transitioned to it for the most part -- enjoying others' embarassment or pain -- makes me wonder how far we are from this future. I would reread this book and would recommend it. (  ) lieslmayerson | Jan 31, 2010 |  First read Oct 2004, as soon as I finished The Year of the Flood I had to pull it out and reread it, and now I am waiting for the third book... (  ) KymmAC | Jan 11, 2010 | My favourite quote: "God of Bullshit, fail me not." ( ) carolynyates | Dec 31, 2009 | As it is dystopian scifi, I obviously enjoyed it, although I'd have appreciated being warned in advance about the protagonist's love for child porn. I thought this book was fine, until I read a load of people on the internet saying how groundbreaking it is and Atwood herself saying it isn't scifi because there aren't any robots or aliens. But its plot is largely based on fictional biology! Argh. I think it's the same kind of thing as The Time Traveler's Wife: scifi marketed at readers of general fiction, who therefore think it can't be scifi because they read it while not living in their parents' basement. Anyway, the book itself is good, although the ending is a bit too obviously setting up for a sequel. (  ) tronella | Dec 31, 2009 | Stupid me, I read this after I read Year of the Flood. The two stand alone well enough that this doesn't seem to be an unforgiveable sin, however. The YOTF focuses on life 25 years after the waterless flood, OAC focuses on the event itself. Both books incorporate some of the same characters. A brilliant genetic engineer designs a pill to increase sexual pleasure, which has the unadvertised side effect of sterility. He sees that the population is seriously challenging the earth's resouces so decides to do something about it. The other unadvertised side effect, though, is a grisley death. His secret project is to design a new version of human without the pesky human characteristics that have doomed it. (  ) mojomomma | Dec 19, 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.
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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 Tue, 05 Jan 2010 11:50:35 -0500)
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