Margaret Atwood - Oryx and Crake
Atwood again demonstrates her aptitude for what she calls “speculative fiction”, taking existing technology and societal observations and imagining her own (near future) worlds based on what’s already happening.
The story revolves around Snowman, for all it’s worth the last man on Earth, and how he observed the events which led to a biotechnology programme gone wrong. The Crake of the title refers to Snowman’s old friend, a genius who creates the biotech which will eventually lead to the world’s demise; Oryx is a mysterious woman who Jimmy (as Snowman was previously known) and Crake saw in their adolescence as a girl in a child pornography film.
The world described is a caution about the future of new technologies and where they might lead us, but it’s also a wry observation on the world as it stands from the view of ordinary people: Jimmy and Crake are, as children, able to access anything they chose over the Internet, no matter how sordid or illicit, in spite of the restrictions placed on them. Inevitably, this numbs them psychologically to the world they interact with.
Tags: books, Margaret Atwood, scifi, speculative fiction
