Name: Oryx and Crake
Rating: 4.035168195718654 (327 reviews)
ISBN: 9780736692489

Margaret Atwood

Campbell Scott

Oryx and Crake

A novel of the future explores a world that has been devastated by ecological and scientific disasters.

Greg Talbot

It's not too often a music artist turns you on to literature, usually it's the other way around. I was very interested in Atwood after reading high praise for her work on "The Handsmaid Tale" and as aforementioned, electronica greats "The Knife" making an album to transcend gender and traditional identity. Their inspiration: Oryx and Crake Atwood skirmishes and plays with all sorts of interesting ideas. The genetically modified pigeons. The mother-son relationship with Jimmy. The relationship of Jimmy and Crake. Jimmy's bewildering alias "Snowman". The research of Crake. The funny way "Paradice" is spelt..not quite a honeymoon right? But "Oryx and Crake" is an ardous affair. My strongsuit is not Sci-fi, but i've read plenty of great works by Ursula K. Le Guin or Phillip K. Dick, and though they also play with futurism and ideas, they don't jettison character development or an effective plot. Atwood's cardinal sin is writer's 101 "show don't tell"; there is a whole lot of telling in this novel. Also, it's difficult to connect to the characters..at one point I was wondering if they were in fact the pigeons, as they never seemed to think or act in a way most human beings do. Jimmy's reprobate behavior is more akin to a cartoon badboy. Atwood has some interesting ideas, and while I never feel they are flushed out or effectively anchored, I think many readers would find a value in this that I did not.

Atwood creates a hellscape (maybe the most nightmarish dystopia I've read, even from her) where scientific advancement and corporate greed render the human experience confusing and meaningless. It's horrific and prophetic and a defense of the humanities.

elizabeth

Sarah Sammis

It's quite a page turner! Snowman reminds me of Romulus from The Caveman's Valentine. In fact the entire narrational tone of Oryx and Crake reminds me of The Caveman's Valentine even though their narratives are quite different.

Doug Belshaw

Michael Springer

So, you go to Wal-Mart to buy your groceries because it's so damn cheap, but then you realize Wal-Mart is hiring very few full-time employees and not offering reasonable health care to its employees and it's walking employees through the process of how to get Medicare, not to mention they're closing down small businesses by exploiting foreign economies to get the lowest possible fucking cost; so, Wal-Mart's making YOU pay medical benefits for ITS employees, and replacing good jobs with shitty ones, and you don't want to support that, not to mention most of their food comes from the big corporations that have copyrighted their grains and are in the process of pushing small farms out of business by suing them for copyright infringement after their seeds blow onto the smaller farmer's land, so you decide to shop somewhere else, and isn't it time to go organic anyway, so you drive over to Trader Joe's and load up your cart, that feeling of guilt finally subsiding.

So you get home and you unload your reusable bags and load up the fridge and then, as you slide a boxed pizza into the freezer, you see, printed across the bottom, "Made in Italy."

So now, you're shopping for your groceries at a different store from where you do the rest of your shopping, adding to your carbon footprint, not to mention they're transporting your pizzas across half the fucking earth before they land on your shelf. So, you may not be selling out your next door neighbor, but now you're shitting a big one right on Mother Earth's face. 

You head down to the local farmer's market and buy some little pygmy apples the size of clementines, and they're all weird colors but they're from some local farm, and you buy some locally made bread and buy some. . . wait, what is this? Red Bull? Doritos? All of a sudden you realize only the fruit here is local, and some of the bread, so you find another farmer across town you can buy beef from, and another farmer who you can get pork from, and now you're buying all locally, and driving all over God's red desert to get everything you need, and spending twice what you did at Wal-Mart, and spending half your saturday collecting food. Now, you're contributing to the local economy and not giving money to the giant food corporations that are trying to push small farms out of business. . . but you're still driving all over to buy the shit, and burning through petroleum like a motherfucker. 

Face it: when it comes to the continuity of life on this planet, you are a pest. You're the renegade cell, eating away at all of the nice and friendly cells around you. I know I'm not telling you anything new right now: you've seen The Matrix, you've heard about overpopulation, global warming, oil spills and you know how totally, absolutely fucked polar bears are right now, but it's always been like that ever since you were born, and we keep coming up with new sciences, so inevitably something will come up to save the day, right? We'll take some polar bear DNA and store it, and once we're all caught up with Jurassic Park technologies, we'll bring 'em back. And, by the time we get to there, we'll be able to stop raising cows; we can just raise steaks: little flat cows that don't have brains, don't have needs other than maybe watering them and spooning nutrients into their slack mouths, and sea-urchin-like chicken creatures without any minds that we can make into chicken fingers, and none of them will feel a thing, so there won't be any question, ethically speaking, right? Right?

Don't hit me up with your "playing God" argument, because that's bullshit. We "play God" when we amputate a gangrenous leg, when we remove a tumor, when we brush our fucking teeth. So, what is really wrong with growing steaks in soil, and not raising cows in huge concentration camps where they hang out in their own shit all day? What's wrong with doing away with coffins, and simply mulching our loved ones? They're going in the dirt either way.

If we're being utilitarian, is our urchin-chicken happier or less happy than our chicken in a lightless pen with ridiculous pecs so oversized his legs are broken? What about the chicken who has gone mad and is now pecking other chickens to death? Probably urchin-chicken. I'm just saying. 

That said, I wouldn't eat urchin-chicken, if I wanted to go out on a limb and say a company would be required to even TELL me the product I was buying was urchin: "Warning: this product is made from something that tastes like, but isn't, a chicken." They don't tell me when my steaks are cloned, or through what fucked up chemical reactions they've made my food, so I have my doubts. 

What's wrong with growing a mindless food animal, much the way we grow corn or rice or soy? What's wrong with growing mindless clones of ourselves, just for the purpose of harvesting their organs? This would be an easier question to answer if I wasn't an atheist, and I could quote an instruction book, but I can't. 

I have to answer the question, and I'll give an answer that Atwood kinda-does-but-doesn't: we don't know what will happen. We didn't know sea walls would increase erosion in other parts of the river when we first started building them. We didn't know that lighthouses would kill tons and tons of birds because birds fly toward the light. We didn't know that carbon emissions could be a problem until we'd flooded tons of them off into the atmosphere. So, why shouldn't we use science to make the world cater to our every desire and impulse? 

Because we can't even predict the weather. 




********



Oh, you want me to talk about the book? Yeah, I guess I could do that. As you can tell by my meta-review, this one gets the gears in your head turning. But, the characters were all flat and, although full of potential, ended up dull. The post-apocalyptic world we're reading about is intriguing, as are the new creatures that have replaced humans. The bizarre, freakish animals created by science are also perfectly horrific. 

That said, some of this feels like a pretty big stretch. According to Atwood, we'll eventually be desensitized enough that we'll enjoy watching people tortured to death online, and we'll also like watching little children having sex with grown men. And I'm not talking about in a "2 girls 1 cup," watch-it-once-because-it-sounds-fucked-up way. . I mean, she imagines people will sit around watching this shit all the time. Perhaps I'm a prude, but I don't think either of these will ever become popular with more than a small audience. My cynicism only goes so far, I guess. 

Far as dystopias go, this is an interesting and unusual one. It's also an entertaining and quick read. I wish Atwood would've invested a bit more time in filling out these characters, and given us a five-star book instead. . . but nobody bats 100%. I'm looking forward to trying some of her non-science fictiony works soon.

John Philpin

a simply STUNNING piece of literature - there is no point me writing lots of stuff here - if you want to read it - read it - and if you want a synopsis = go here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oryx_and...

Rohan Uddin

Haunting. Shockingly written. Each sentence filled with meaning. One of science-fiction's most used topics - "The End Of The World" - presented greatly. The events in this novel are nothing less than crazy, but they fulfill their purpose. Improved my sentence structure.

Prashanth Srivatsa

Ambitious and frightening, Oryx and Crake portrays the bane of genetic obsession, of the fascination to control sexual instincts and approach immortality. Through Snowman(Jimmy), Atwood, with her razor sharp wit and wealth of language, has created a character that is both unforgettable in his romance and pitiable in his losses. It is his story of childhood traumas, sexual fantasies and professional guilt that makes our own reality all the more scarier.

Oryx and Crake : a Novel. 01

MaddAddam Trilogy

Stefanie Viens

I had a love/hate relationship with this story, primarily because of Snowman's character. I disliked him at the beginning, because of his cynicism, his lack of purpose etc. I became much more interested in him when he was recounting his time with Crake, and slowly uncovering for us the mystery of these new humans, and how they came to be. I feel like the end was tied off quite well. I actually did not know there was a sequel at first, and I felt that it worked quite well as a standalone book.

edith w.

(Very mild spoiler.) 

Now THAT'S how you write dystopia. There wasn't a moment when I didn't find myself in trepidation about what was going to happen. Only one thing was certain: this was not going to end well. And, from what I can tell, it really didn't. 

I read Year of the Flood ages ago - not realising then that it was part of a trilogy - so I'm about to do so again in its correct running order. I loved it the first time so all this context and set-up will make reading it again all the more enjoyable. If Atwood wrote 1000 books, I swear I would read them all.

Fran Lewis

very interesting read. I am not usually a reader of this type of fiction but I liked it.

Cams Campbell

I started this in audiobook format in 2010 and, for some reason, gave up on it. I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that some books are actually better in written form than audio. That said, my second and successful attempt were also with the audiobook and I thoroughly enjoyed it, although I would like to return to it in written form some day, because the language is so good. This here is no pulp fiction, this is literature, baby! 

As many others have stated in their reviews, what is so striking about this dystopian science-fiction story is its plausibility. We're kind of half way there already with genetic engineering and gene splicing. It's like the Frankenstein conundrum, but in the modern age. just because we can doesn't mean we should. 

I see from the header on Goodreads that this is the first of a trilogy. I'll have to look into that, although I did think the ending of the story was just right. I could imagine high-school and university students discussing the ending in tutorials and essays. Brilliant!

lizbet koval

i was intrigued at first.
and then i was disappointed.
it’s an interesting take on the genre, but. personally for me it was undone, unfinished, raw.

Oryx and Crake

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