Oryx and Crake

For literary speculation week, I decided to pick up Oryx and Crake, a novel by Margaret Atwood.   This novel can be classified as and fit into a number of different genre's but I think post-apocalyptic science fiction probably fits it best.   But, apparently the author herself has been said to label it as speculative fiction instead because it doesn't deal with “things that have not been invented yet.”

I noticed two main themes to Atwood's novel; the first being a distant future where earth's been effected by global warming to the point that coastal cities don't even exist, and it's impossible to live for any substantial amount of time outside in the sun.  Most of the wealthier areas of the world are protected under places known as compounds, but there are places where the poor unprotected people live called the Pleeblands.

The second major theme has to do with the 3 central characters.  The novel is mostly a single character driven novel in the form of Snowman, but most of the novels contents are contained with in his past where there are 3 main characters.  In the past he is known as Jimmy, his “best” friend is Crake, and his lover (also Crake's) Oryx.  The flashbacks seemed to take up most of the story's text, but almost everything in the novel is substantial, a lot of the beginning of Jimmy's story is a little boring but towards the end it's actually pretty interesting how Atwood connects things, like the game's creators being so much more than anyone ever expected in the beginning.

I found myself much more interested in Snowman's survival, the new world that was created by the catastrophic event, and Snowman's interaction with the utopian people the Crakers.  It isn't as if anymore thought was put into it over the flashbacks, since it's all very well done, Atwood has fully realized her dystopian future world in almost every detail.  But, it's rather a preference, considering I'm very much a fan of the barren post-apocalyptic tale that we see in all kinds of games, books, and movies in the current generation I really latched on to that part of the novel.  It seems like a prevalent part of the flashback sequences was the really odd sexual references and pedophilia that I found kind of disturbing and made me not want to read them as much.

Overall I feel that it was an extremely inventive tale with its allusion to scientific advances and ideas of the present that are pushed into the future to be developed and eventually cause the fall of man.  This is almost a cautionary tale of sorts ,but even if it's not viewed as that, there's no denying that it's a great piece of literature in all aspects.  I was interested to see if a sequel had been written and apparently the author has released a novel called,  The Year of the Flood, which isn't a direct sequel but has a lot of connections to Oryx and Crake; I'll probably give this one a shot when time permits.

-Dan