Oryx and Crake

Maybe 3.5?

An eco-dystopia about a bio-apocalypse end times, this book was super readable (such plot!) but ultimately left me pretty meh on its themes and characters.

May I disclaim: I love and worship at the shrine of Margaret Atwood's angry, feminist, other dystopian classic, The Handmaid's Tale. I mean, I am not joking here, I read this book WHILE WEARING A HANDMAID'S TALE TSHIRT (order yours today), which is what I like to wear to work sometimes as a sort of moral “stay gold, ponygirl” talisman, as a way to lend myself a little bit of punk.

But while Handmaid's Tale is singular and dark and angry AND SO PUNK, with the wit of sharp knives, Oryx and Crake is, instead, kinda cliche and more like the pretty straightforward alt rock of dystopias. The protagonist's dark, angry, witty turmoil just feels blah, and the overall worldbuilding is pretty reheated.

Basic plot: The world is a post-apocalyptic trash heap, with many signs of eco-chaos: scorching UV, too many bugs, crazy storms. Also, lots of genetically modified freak show animals wander around such as: neon green rabbits, “pigoons”, “rakunks”, and so on. There is one normal-seeming (as in, human) dude, Jimmy (alias Snowman), of indeterminate age but very crusty, very gross, and very depressed. He is surrounded by a large group of naked innocenti semi-humans with super firm bods and blank stares/empty heads. The book follows Snowman's angry, crusty meditations on how shit came to this: mostly as he (A) tells “the Children of Crake” (the naked bimbos and himbos nearby) about their magical Godhead, “Crake” (who is clear, early on, was Snowman's pre-apocalypse friend), and (B) flashbacks to his childhood, adolescence, and young adult years.

In Plot A, basically nothing happens, beyond Snowman being miserable and the world being over. So you spend most of the book chomping at the bit of Plot B: what happened???? you are made to ask. It's also clear, early on, that Crake (formerly Glenn) was a genius, and a total asshole, and so I guess A MAD SCIENTIST. Anyway, the world turns to gray goo, except it's red goo (cuz blood; warning for gore). And Margaret Atwood's plotting and pacing is AIRTIGHT, I tell you.

The book also ends on a cliffhanger. ATWOOOOOOOD!!! shaking fist

Now, I have, in my time, enjoyed dystopias. We live, after all, in an age of compiling existential threats: nuclear war, bio-apocalypse (Gates worried publicly about this last month), AI apocalypse (Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Gates are all worried about this), and the almost-banal-because-it's-true climate change/eco-collapse. We are definitely accumulating ways to wipe ourselves out here. Someone (Musk?) GET US OFF THIS ROCK. And the fictional dystopias thus proliferate (here's a website that lets you tick off dystopias that have already come true/are already possible). Someday I will write a meditation on why we can't envision utopias anymore, not since good ol' Star Trek: The Next Generation, but how important that would be. We need a religion! We need a vision to aspire to! Anyway.

Anyway.

Anyway, given this dystopia glut, as well as the real existential threats, I have become picky. In terms of bio-dystopias, Oryx & Crake is kinda middling: I liked the dark, gory hilariousness of Blood Music more, and the eco-points of The Windup Girl (yes, even that) more.

I did like Atwood's portrayal of a decaying society, one just on the verge of apocalypse. This is rarely done (usually the schism between Before and After is very stark; where Before is basically a pretty nice Now, and After is an unrecognizable hellscape). One other good portrayal of a “twilight” society sliding into the abyss is the original Mad Max - things feel basically “normal”, yet there are weird, jarring, discordant moments (wtf motorcycle gangs); a permeating uneasiness that's hard to pin down (well, I guess it was the amoral motorcycle gangs). Compare this, of course, to the Much Further Along the Road to Hell version of dystopia portrayed in the latest Mad Max (via my favorite scene!). Life sucks in that desert hellworld, but it's also... kinda fun? Kinda thrilling? It's become coherent again; an internally consistent world/culture. The original Mad Max, and the moments in flashback in Oryx & Crake, instead, portray the slowly shifting ground beneath our feet: things LOOK the same as now, but FEEL wrong. Eerie! V. good.

Oh yeah, Station Eleven is another bio-apocalypse. I rated it 4?! I guess I have higher standards for Margaret. Anyway, this one's probably better than that. Station Eleven is just super vanilla “everyone got sick and died, disaster movie, no nvm some people are OK”. This is a bit cleverer than that (what with the God and morality stuff). But I will not spoilerize, so - read it??

ATWOOOOOOOOO