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Who brought the cat?
Jul. 4th, 2006 10:35 amI finished reading Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. I liked this quite a bit. Atwood seems to be a good author for people who like science fiction but want to wander into the Reputable Authors section of the bookstore/library; the three books of hers I've read all have some sort of SF component. (Of the other two, The Handmaid's Tale is an alternate-future story; I thought The Blind Assassin was just depressing the whole way through, but there's an SF-ish story woven through it.)
Oryx and Crake is an alternate-future story about what happens if the pharmaceutical/bioengineering companies get out of control. The world has ended, approximately, and there's one Real Human left, who has figured out how to live without the comforts of the now-ruined civilization and fend off the newly created wildlife. A lot of the story is spent in flashbacks, but this basically means that there are three plotlines, all of which do succeed in moving forward. Crake is the protagonist's boy-genius childhood friend, who gets into both computer and biological hacking; Oryx is a girl who appears first in adolescent-viewed porn.
The world is believable and well-developed, though, and the story is entertaining for being post-apocalyptic. Atwood does seem to be good at verbal humor, and so I will leave you with the following:
The prospect of his future life stretched before him like a sentence; not a prison sentence, but a long-winded sentence with a lot of unnecessary subordinate clauses, as he was soon in the habit of quipping during Happy Hour pickup time at the local campus bars and pubs.
Oryx and Crake is an alternate-future story about what happens if the pharmaceutical/bioengineering companies get out of control. The world has ended, approximately, and there's one Real Human left, who has figured out how to live without the comforts of the now-ruined civilization and fend off the newly created wildlife. A lot of the story is spent in flashbacks, but this basically means that there are three plotlines, all of which do succeed in moving forward. Crake is the protagonist's boy-genius childhood friend, who gets into both computer and biological hacking; Oryx is a girl who appears first in adolescent-viewed porn.
The world is believable and well-developed, though, and the story is entertaining for being post-apocalyptic. Atwood does seem to be good at verbal humor, and so I will leave you with the following:
The prospect of his future life stretched before him like a sentence; not a prison sentence, but a long-winded sentence with a lot of unnecessary subordinate clauses, as he was soon in the habit of quipping during Happy Hour pickup time at the local campus bars and pubs.
