Margaret Atwood's classic novel, The Handmaid's Tale, is about the future. Now, in Oryx and Crake, the future has changed. It's much worse and bleaker. And we're well on the road to it now. The narrator is Snowman (a man once known as Jimmy), self-named though not self-created. As the story begins, he's sleeping in a tree, wearing a dirty old bedsheet, mourning the loss of his beautiful and beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. Earlier, Snowman's life was one of comparative privilege. Crake ...
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Margaret Atwood's classic novel, The Handmaid's Tale, is about the future. Now, in Oryx and Crake, the future has changed. It's much worse and bleaker. And we're well on the road to it now. The narrator is Snowman (a man once known as Jimmy), self-named though not self-created. As the story begins, he's sleeping in a tree, wearing a dirty old bedsheet, mourning the loss of his beautiful and beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. Earlier, Snowman's life was one of comparative privilege. 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. How did everything fall apart so quickly? Was he himself in any way responsible? Why is he now left alone with his bizarre memories - except for the more-than-perfect, green-eyed Children of Crake, who think of him as a kind of monster? He explores the answers to these questions in the double journey he takes - into his own past, and back to Crake's high-tech bubble dome, where the Paradice Project unfolded and the world came to grief. With breathtaking command of her shocking material and with her customary sharp wit and dark humour, Atwood projects us into a less-than-brave new world, an outlandish yet wholly believable space populated by a cast of characters who will continue to inhabit your dreams long after the last chapter
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Add this copy of Oryx and Crake to cart. $11.28, new condition, Sold by GreatBookPrices rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Columbia, MD, UNITED STATES, published 2004 by Vintage.
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Add this copy of Oryx and Crake (the Maddaddam Trilogy) to cart. $12.99, new condition, Sold by Bookfarm rated 3.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Escondido, CA, UNITED STATES, published 2004 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
Add this copy of Oryx and Crake (the Maddaddam Trilogy); 9780385721677; to cart. $14.01, new condition, Sold by APlus Textbooks rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Alpharetta, GA, UNITED STATES, published 2004 by Vintage.
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ninthchord
Oct 8, 2010
Thoroughly inundated with intertextuality: the Bible, Huxley, Orwell, etc. Similar to Huxley with the theme of a dystopian future and genetic engineering gone awry, or at least taken to its most extreme. I was surprised with many of Atwood's ideas and found them quite creative. I appreciate that she uses certain words in order to preserve them or save them from obscurity (brainfart, for example), but it would have been better to use them in context instead of listing them in Snowman's thoughts.
Also, the theme of genetic engineering taken to the extreme has been done before: Huxley's "Brave New World" and Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar," for examples. The problem is that, even though Atwood attempts to update this trope by including technology since those books appeared (the Internet, chat rooms, etc.), she offers nothing new to the story and Brunner and Orwell told the story better.
lovelywilde
Aug 5, 2009
beautiful
Oryx and Crake is at once beautiful and unsettling, thoughtful and terrifying, imaginative and down-to-earth.
wordnerd
Nov 6, 2008
It is excellent IF you enjoy reading about possible future scenarios here on eart. A future that does not have aliens, but just of science gone out-of-control. One that makes you think about the way we are headed.
conso
Sep 28, 2008
A book worth reading!
This is the first book I read from Margaret Atwood. I found it very interesting and scarily realistic. We are living days of profound changes all around the world, both socially and environmentally oriented, and the author gives us a glimpse of a situation that could possibly become true in the future. The story is easy to read and follow, and it captures the reader's attention from the very first chapter. I will definitely purchase another book by this author.
