Will I love Oryx and Crake?

A wonderfully imaginative novel of a distopian future. In a world brought too collapse by a rampant capitalist biotech the characters make their way across a blighted landscape. Sounds grim indeed, but there is humor as well as pathos and the beautifully crafted writing lifts you up into the swirl of events where past and present intersect and loop back again. The first in the 3 volume MaddAddam Trilogy that I never wanted to end.

Atwood is an icon of speculative fiction. Her worlds are so impressively imagined you become part of them. This leads to a new understanding of humanity and the path we have set upon. I am a huge fan of Margaret Atwood.

This was a book club choice, and as soon as I finished it, I bought the other two books in the trilogy. I literally couldn’t put them down! Another post-apocalypse for this list, this time, the story is told through the memories of Jimmy/Snowman. But make no mistake, the novel is about Crake, a brilliant, lonely, and terrifying young man.

As Jimmy tries to recover his past, shadowed by the gentle, green-skinned ‘children of Crake,’ he recalls the events leading up to the end of humanity. This is very much a mystery, so I must be careful what I reveal,… show more.

This book rewrote my nightmares with its haunting portrayal of a world undone by scientific hubris. Atwood’s disturbingly plausible vision of unchecked genetic experimentation left me both awed and terrified. Jimmy’s reluctant witness to humanity’s downfall made me confront uncomfortable truths about our ambitions.

Years later, I still find myself looking at scientific breakthroughs with a mix of excitement and dread, wondering if we’re edging closer to Atwood’s chilling vision.

Imagine a world sliding into a climate apocalypse… and society just shrugs. This is an anxiety-inducing book, and another one that I had to read twice before I fully appreciated it, but it’s also one of the smartest books that speculates on climate change and just how much that could impact society around us.

I find this book thought-provoking and frustrating because I see these brilliant characters making selfish decisions that feed a self-destructive world, and this novel has only grown more relevant as the years have passed. Margaret Atwood doesn’t like to think of this as science fiction, but… show more.

I love Margaret Atwood, and this book is arguably even more prophetic than The Handmaid’s Tale.

Atwood’s eponymous Crake hopes to improve the world with a pill that will “eliminate the external causes of death.” His solution, BlyssPluss, is one part narcotic, one part Viagra, and one part insidious tool of mass sterilization.

I find Atwood a delightful writer, at once wonderfully playful and unapologetically cynical. From a post-pandemic perspective, it’s tempting to call her a visionary. 

This book is light on hope, but if you’re on the hunt for cli-fi dystopias, Oryx and Crake is a must-read.

The novel’s protagonist, Snowman (previously known as Jimmy), finds himself alone (sort of) after a global societal collapse. His story unfolds on either side of this collapse as he searches for answers about what has happened to the world and why.

This book brings together runaway climate change, an apocalyptic pandemic, uncontrolled genetic engineering, mass extinction, and more, dealing with nostalgia for what’s been lost and reckoning with each person’s individual culpability for that loss. And yet it somehow… show more.

This is a fabulously wild ride into a dystopian world that carries all of humanity’s worst habits to their logical conclusions.

Atwood uses science, specifically unrestricted and unregulated genetic engineering, to demonstrate how a technology that was developed with a noble goal (in this case, creating pigs that can grow human organs for transplant) can spiral out of control.

There is a lot more to this twisted tale but I’d rather not spoil it, the slow reveal of what has carried the protagonist from bad to worse is what makes him a sympathetic character, who despite all his flaws we… show more.

Many dystopian novels portray future events that are unlikely at best.

For example, what are the chances that a super-volcano will erupt out of Yellowstone National Park and destroy much of North America? Not high. But one thing is certain.

Climate change is upon us, and most of us will see unwelcome changes to the world around us in our lifetimes. We already do. Margaret Atwood’s award-winning novel, Oryx and Crake, shows us what may well be some of the consequences.

But it’s not climate change porn. It’s a brilliant novel that weaves together several themes into an engaging… show more.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood—and the MaddAddam trilogy it kicks off—is the distillation of a century of dystopian science fiction incorporating the strongest elements from Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, 1984, and even a hint of Atwood’s own The Handmaid's Tale. The world Atwood conjures in Oryx and Crake is so vivid, sharp, and intoxicating that it has transformed how I think about science fiction. Out of the fiction books I've read in the last twenty years, Oryx and Crake has had the most profound effect on me and I couldn't recommend it more highly:… show more.