Book 89: Oryx and Crake

This is a science fiction novel/cautionary tale by Margaret Atwood, published in 2003. Atwood just released the sequel, The Year of the Flood, which I'm reading now. I really enjoy Atwood almost all of the time. She often has a sci-fi component to her writing, but it's tempered with a heavy literary bent.

Oryx and Crake is about the last man on earth, and how he got to that point (or is it?)

It's about science-for-profit gone awry, and some of the horrors that can be created, such as chicken knob-thingies: giant chicken breasts growing without heads or brains; just throats down which nutrients may be poured. And gene-splicing to create giant hogs that grow human body parts for transplanting.

Or it's about the convenience and modernity offered by super technology: "a gym suit that cleaned itself overnight due to sweat-eating bacteria, a shirt that displayed email on its sleeve while giving him a little nudge every time he had a message, shoes that changed colour to match his outfits, a talking toaster."

And it's about there being such a huge separation between the classes that our protagonist, Jimmy, who lives in a guarded, gated Compound looks forward to escaping to the dirty "pleeblands" just for a bit of freedom. Atwood describes him riding on a train through the world of the middle class who have nothing to do with the big science corporations: "He glimpsed a couple of trailer parks, and wondered what it was like to live in one of them: just thinking about it made him slightly dizzy, as he imagined a desert might, or the sea. Everything in the pleeblands seemed so boundless, so porous, so penetrable, so wide-open. So subject to change."

And it's about love and obsession and friendship and loyalty.

The setting seems to be the U.S., but slightly in the future. It's an entertaining, imaginative read, and the world Atwood creates is not too much of a stretch from our current reality.