Oryx and Crake

daltonlp writes "I haven't felt this satisfied after finishing a science fiction novel since Ender's Game. I waited some weeks to review it, to make sure I wasn't simply infatuated. Oryx and Crake is woven from a great many themes near and dear to SF, but it's primarily a retelling of the story of Adam and Eve--except in reverse (the world isn't beginning, but ending)." Read on for the rest of Dalton's review. Oryx and Crake author Margaret Atwood pages 374 publisher Random House, 2003 rating Worth reading reviewer Lloyd Dalton ISBN 0385503857 summary A retelling of the story of Adam and Eve--except in reverse. The world isn't beginning, but ending.

The novel is a mad scientist story, where humans play God for pleasure and profit. It's a last-human-left-alive story. It's a projection of a dystopic future, where all political and economic power is held by militaristic corporations.

Most of these themes have been explored before, and they're introduced in the first couple chapters of the book. But they're handled so well, I feel like I'm spoiling the reader's experience by listing them here. Never mind, read the book anyway. Maybe you've seen this stuff before, but you haven't seen it written like this.

The measure of science fiction isn't the uniqueness of its concepts--it's what the author can do using the ideas as tools. It's about how intensely a book can penetrate into the reader's imagination, and this is driven by a writer's talent (not the raw ideas).

Margaret Atwood writes stories that are deeply layered and voiced in an incisive, conversational tone. Despite its bleak themes, Oryx and Crake is far from depressing--it's mostly cheerful and upbeat, which turns out to be a fine way to write about obsession and love and revenge and the end of the world. Somewhat like Neal Stephenson, Atwood's writing doesn't take itself too seriously. It's chock full of wordplays and grimly humorous subtexts. The result is a book that works as both a dark comedy and an allegoric drama, but feels like a conversation between the author and the reader.

Some parts of Oryx and Crake approach horror--not blood & guts horror, but what someone from the 1700s might feel if a time traveler explained the basics of how nuclear weapons, school shootings and Internet porn work today. Atwood pulls very few punches when imagining the possible extensions of humanity's greed, lust, hatred, and cold-bloodedness. Her easy pace, artful characterization and humorous touch fully engages the reader's mind, and her willingness to shock takes full advantage of the open target. The result is a mental chill that takes a long time to fade.

It's not a perfect book. Even at 374 pages, some episodes of the story arc seem abbreviated. Some of Atwood's future visions seem a bit contrived, but this depends on whether she's going for humor, symbolism, shock value or sheer inventiveness on a given page. Most pages (including the following excerpt) are a well-stirred mixture:

"On day one they toured some of the wonders of Watson-Crick. Crake was interested in everything--all the projects that were going on. He kept saying "Wave of the future," which got irritating after the third time.

First they went to Decor Botanicals, where a team of five seniors were developing Smart Wallpaper that would change colour on the walls of your room to complement your mood. This wallpaper--they told Jimmy--had a modified form of Kirilian energy-sensing algae embedded in it, along with a sublayer of algae nutrients, but there were still some glitches to be fixed. The wallpaper was short-lived in humid weather because it ate up all the nutrients and then went grey; also it could not tell the difference between drooling lust and murderous rage, and was likely to turn your wallpaper an erotic pink when what you really needed was a murky, capillary-bursting greenish red.

That team was also working on a line of bathroom towels that would behave in much the same way, but they hadn't yet solved the marine-life fundamentals: when algae got wet it swelled up and began to grow, and the test subjects so far had not liked the sight of their towels from the night before puffing up like rectangular marshmallows and inching across the bathroom floor.

"Wave of the future," said Crake."

It's too early to tell if Oryx and Crake will earn Atwood the same acclaim as The Blind Assassin and The Handmaid's Tale. Regardless, it's a powerful book--unnerving, moving and well worth reading.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Certain scenarios have become standard fare, almost cliches, within the science fiction world. The end of civilization, indeed the death of man himself, due to his constant meddling with the environment, other life forms, and his own germ plasm have been envisaged many times before. This book remains a cut above most earlier attempts, as it adds a very believable human face to the disaster, ties it to both man's dreams and his nightmares, and wraps it inside a potent love triangle.

From the beginning of this book, where we meet Snowman, possibly the last true human, living in a tree and dependent on the half-human Children of Crake, till the very end of this book, where the full horror of the situation is clearly exposed, there is a sense of inevitability to events, a clear line to its envisioned world from the headlines of today. As Snowman tells his tale via flashbacks to his own past, a picture is developed of technology both fighting and aiding the deleterious effects of prior technologies. From the global warming induced drowning of the coasts and the collapse of world's resources abilities to feed an ever-growing population, to terrorist and greedy corporations designs of new diseases and environmentally harmful crosses of various animal species, each element piles on to background structure. In the foreground we follow Jimmy (Snowman's original name) and his childhood friend Glenn (Crake) as they go through school and find jobs as part of the elite, those whose mental abilities make them employable by the movers and shakers of the world, the genetic research laboratories. During their joint exploration of the internet, they run into Oryx, a child prostitute, who will eventually figure prominently in their lives.

Crake is a very interesting character, a super-genius who keeps his own emotions hidden, sometimes even from himself, as he first conceives of and then implements the idea of designing a better human. A human who is not subject to wild emotional swings of love, who will not have the need to defend property as he will live on grass and sunshine, who will be carefully isolated from any contact with violence-causing ideas such as 'God' and 'mine'. But Crake is not immune to being human himself, and is in fact dependent on others, primarily Oryx and Jimmy, which is really his flaw. Jimmy is the perennial follower, but when forced to take charge, his actions become the final lynch-pin in the ultimate disaster and his tales the beginning of a new mythology. Oryx is the ultimate woman, fully caring and giving, perhaps too much so, without the ability to turn others to a line of action of her choosing - but perhaps she never wished to. These characters grew on me as I learned more about them, as each had characteristics I could see in myself, different parts of a mirror.

The power of this book lies in the dynamic between the dream and the practical, between the intent and the result, between the giving and receiving of love. There are several layers of meaning and symbol buried within its fairly conventional story, layers that built an emotionally powerful edifice in my mind, an edifice completed with the last scene of this book. Sad and depressing, with little room for hope, a well depicted portrait of man as he is, unvarnished.

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