In Oryx and Crake, a science fiction novel that is more Swift than Heinlein, more cautionary tale than "fictional science" (no flying cars here), Margaret Atwood depicts a near-future world that turns from the merely horrible to the horrific, from a fool's paradise to a bio-wasteland. Snowman (a man once known as Jimmy) sleeps in a tree and just might be the only human left on our devastated planet. He is not entirely alone, however, as he considers himself the shepherd of a group of experimental, human-like creatures called the Children of Crake. As he scavenges and tends to his insect bites, Snowman recalls in flashbacks how the world fell apart.

While the story begins with a rather ponderous set-up of what has become a clichéd landscape of the human endgame, littered with smashed computers and abandoned buildings, it takes on life when Snowman recalls his boyhood meeting with his best friend Crake: "Crake had a thing about him even then.... He generated awe ... in his dark laconic clothing." A dangerous genius, Crake is the book's most intriguing character. Crake and Jimmy live with all the other smart, rich people in the Compounds--gated company towns owned by biotech corporations. (Ordinary folks are kept outside the gates in the chaotic "pleeblands.") Meanwhile, beautiful Oryx, raised as a child prostitute in Southeast Asia, finds her way to the West and meets Crake and Jimmy, setting up an inevitable love triangle. Eventually Crake's experiments in bioengineering cause humanity's shockingly quick demise (with uncanny echoes of SARS, ebola, and mad cow disease), leaving Snowman to try to pick up the pieces. There are a few speed bumps along the way, including some clunky dialogue and heavy-handed symbols such as Snowman's broken watch, but once the bleak narrative gets moving, as Snowman sets out in search of the laboratory that seeded the world's destruction, it clips along at a good pace, with a healthy dose of wry humor. --Mark Frutkin, Amazon.ca


From Publishers Weekly
Atwood has visited the future before, in her dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale. In her latest, the future is even bleaker. The triple whammy of runaway social inequality, genetic technology and catastrophic climate change, has finally culminated in some apocalyptic event. As Jimmy, apparently the last human being on earth, makes his way back to the RejoovenEsencecompound for supplies, the reader is transported backwards toward that cataclysmic event, its full dimensions gradually revealed. Jimmy grew up in a world split between corporate compounds (gated communities metastasized into city-states) and pleeblands (unsafe, populous and polluted urban centers). His best friend was "Crake," the name originally his handle in an interactive Net game, Extinctathon. Even Jimmy's mother-who ran off and joined an ecology guerrilla group when Jimmy was an adolescent-respected Crake, already a budding genius. The two friends first encountered Oryx on the Net; she was the eight-year-old star of a pedophilic film on a site called HottTotts. Oryx's story is a counterpoint to Jimmy and Crake's affluent adolescence. She was sold by her Southeast Asian parents, taken to the city and eventually made into a sex "pixie" in some distant country. Jimmy meets Oryx much later-after college, after Crake gets Jimmy a job with ReJoovenEsence. Crake is designing the Crakers-a new, multicolored placid race of human beings, smelling vaguely of citron. He's procured Oryx to be his personal assistant. She teaches the Crakers how to cope in the world and goes out on secret missions. The mystery on which this riveting, disturbing tale hinges is how Crake and Oryx and civilization vanished, and how Jimmy-who also calls himself "the Snowman," after that other rare, hunted specimen, the Abominable Snowman-survived. Chesterton once wrote of the "thousand romances that lie secreted in The Origin of Species." Atwood has extracted one of the most hair-raising of them, and one of the most brilliant. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
Snowman may be the last man alive after a killer virus has decimated the world. In flashback, Snowman reveals his pre-plague world and the events leading to its inevitable devastation. In a society whose morality and ethics have fallen to the Great God Science, biotechies tampering with the genetic code have engineered brainless chickens with three breasts; designer babies; BlyssPlus, the Fountain of Youth in a pill; and a grotesque assortment of animals created for organ and tissue transplants. Campbell Scott's husky, intimate tones intensify Snowman's exhaustion and complement Atwood's always credible scenario. Atwood's impeccable storytelling offers tantalizing "what ifs" but no solutions. This is an important book by one of the great authors of our time read in the sexiest rasp since Frank Muller. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
Surely Atwood deserved a respite after The Blind Assassin (2000) won the Booker Prize, but the muse had more to say, hence this hijack-intense speculative novel, sister to one of Atwood's most indelible works, The Handmaid's Tale (1985). Jimmy is struggling to stay alive on a wreckage-littered Earth besieged by a brutal sun and overrun with smart and vicious test-tube-bred predators. Now calling himself Snowman (as in Abominable), he's preparing for an arduous scavenger expedition back to the formerly high-tech compound in which he lived and worked until the bioengineering industry ran amok and a catastrophic event put an end to civilization. Snowman is desperately lonely, but he isn't actually alone since he serves as guru for a strangely passive tribe unaware of the lost world of computers, bullet trains, Web porn, gene-splicing, and the plagues that Snowman so vividly and regretfully recalls. As Snowman remembers his friend, Crake, an emotionally remote genius, as well as the love of Snowman's life, an enigmatic survivor of childhood sexual abuse called Oryx, Atwood conjures a grim, all-too-plausible future in order to consider the possibly devastating consequences of our present ill-advised biotech pursuits. Rigorous in its chilling insights and riveting in its fast-paced "what if" dramatization, Atwood's superb novel is as brilliantly provocative as it is profoundly engaging. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
“Towering and intrepid. . . . Atwood does Orwell one better.” —The New Yorker

“Atwood has long since established herself as one of the best writers in English today, but Oryx and Crake may well be her best work yet. . . . Brilliant, provocative, sumptuous and downright terrifying.” —The Baltimore Sun

“Her shuddering post-apocalyptic vision of the world . . . summons up echoes of George Orwell, Anthony Burgess and Aldous Huxley. . . . Oryx and Crake [is] in the forefront of visionary fiction.” —The Seattle Times

“A book too marvelous to miss.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune

“Majestic. . . . Keep[s] us on the edges of our seats.” —The Washington Post



Review
?Ingenious and disturbing.? A landmark work of speculative fiction, comparable to A Clockwork Orange, Brave New World.? Atwood has surpassed herself.?
?Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

?Rigorous in its chilling insights and riveting in its fast-paced ?what if? dramatization, Atwood?s superb novel is as brilliantly provocative as it is profoundly engaging.?
?Booklist (starred review)

?Oryx and Crake is Atwood at her playful, allegorical best.?
?Globe and Mail

?[Oryx and Crake is written] with a style and grace that demonstrate again just how masterful a storyteller she is. If one measure of art?s power is its ability to force you to face what you would very much rather not, Oryx and Crake ? the evocative tale of a nightmarish near-future ? is an extraordinary work of art, one that reaffirms Atwood?s place at the apex of Canadian literature.?
?Maclean?s

?Atwood?s new masterpiece.?Extraordinary.? [Atwood pulls] back the curtain on her terrible vision with such tantalizing precision, its fearsome implications don?t fully reveal themselves until the final pages.? A darkly comic work of speculative fiction.?
?W Magazine (U.S.)

?For all its artistic achievement, this novel poses serious questions.? Margaret Atwood is a consummate artist, yes, but her work also pricks our social and ethical consciousness. That is a rare combination, an important
achievement.??
?Globe and Mail

?Atwood?s great talent for narrative has never been displayed to better effect.?
?Toronto Star

?Riveting.?Chesterton once wrote of the ?thousand romances that lie secreted in The Origin of Species.? Atwood has extracted one of the most hair-raising of them, and one of the most brilliant.?
?Publishers Weekly

?Oryx and Crake is Atwood at her best ? dark, dry, scabrously witty, yet moving and studded with flashes of pure poetry. Her gloriously inventive brave new world is all the more chilling because of the mirror it holds up to our own. Citizens, be warned.?
?The Independent (U.K.)

?Oryx and Crake can hold its own against any of the 20th century?s most potent dystopias ? Brave New World, 1984, The Space Merchants ? with regard to both dramatic impact and fertility of invention.?Oryx and Crake showcases a nightmare version of the present era of globalization on a globe coming apart at its ecological seams.? It is a scathing (because bang-on) portrait of the way we live now.?Majestic.??
?Washington Post

?Is there a more accomplished or versatile writer, in Canada, than Margaret Atwood?? Atwood is on top of the times ? intuits them, really.? The moral questions of Oryx and Crake are already in play.?
?National Post (profile)

?Oryx and Crake is a broad canvas that allows Atwood to show off her brilliant talent for satire and wordplay, as well as her considerable love and knowledge of the natural world.?
?Quill & Quire

?Wonderfully vivid, and the sardonic unveiling of future history makes for a strong narrative drive.?
?National Post

?Perfectly constructed, funny, and satiric. It is inventive yet prophetic, in fact, apocalyptic and weirdly feasible.? It is brilliant.?
?Winnipeg Free Press

?Oryx and Crake is set just the other side of the evening news, in a future so close we can smell its stench.?Atwood has outdone herself here.?
?Georgia Straight

?Contemporary novelists rarely write about science or technology. Margaret Atwood tackles both ? and more ? in one of the year?s most surprising novels.?
?The Economist



From the Hardcover edition.

ANNOTATION

Shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

As the story opens, the narrator, who calls himself Snowman, is sleeping in a tree, wearing a dirty old bedsheet, mourning the loss of his beautiful and beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. In a world in which science-based corporations have recently taken mankind on an uncontrolled genetic-engineering ride, he now searches for supplies in a wasteland. Insects proliferate and pigoons and wolvogs ravage the Pleeblands, where ordinary people once lived, and the Compounds that sheltered the extraordinary. As he tries to piece together what has taken place, the narrative shifts to decades earlier. How did everything fall apart so quickly? Why is Snowman left with nothing but his bizarre memories - alone except for the more-than-perfect, green-eyed Children of Crake, who think of him as a kind of monster? He explores the answers to these questions in the double journey he takes - into his own past and back to Crake's high-tech bubble dome, where the Paradice Project unfolded and the world came to grief.

SYNOPSIS

A stunning and provocative new novel by the internationally celebrated author of The Blind Assassin, winner of the Booker Prize

Margaret Atwood's new novel is so utterly compelling, so prescient, so relevant, so terrifyingly-all-too-likely-to-be-true, that readers may find their view of the world forever changed after reading it.

FROM THE CRITICS

USA Today

A less talented writer might have preached. But Atwood entices with deadpan humor and wry asides from Snowman's sunbaked subconscious, commenting on the fall of civilization. — Jakie Pray

The New York Times

This is the intention of the novel: to goad us to thought by making us screen in the mind a powerful vision of competence run amok. What Atwood could not have intended, and what is no less alarming and exponentially more urgent, is the resonance between her rampaging plague scenario and the recent global outbreak of SARS. Moving from book to newspaper, or newspaper to book, the reader realizes, with a jolt, how the threshold of difference has been lowered in recent months. The force of Atwood's imagining grows in direct proportion to our rising anxiety level. And so does the importance of her implicit caution. — Sven Birkerts

The Washington Post

Set in a future some two generations hence, Oryx and Crake can hold its own against any of the 20th century's most potent dystopias -- Brave New World, 1984, The Space Merchants -- with regard to both dramatic impact and fertility of invention, while it leaves such lesser recent contenders as Paul Theroux and Doris Lessing in the dust. — Thomas M. Disch

Publishers Weekly

Atwood has visited the future before, in her dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale. In her latest, the future is even bleaker. The triple whammy of runaway social inequality, genetic technology and catastrophic climate change, has finally culminated in some apocalyptic event. As Jimmy, apparently the last human being on earth, makes his way back to the RejoovenEsencecompound for supplies, the reader is transported backwards toward that cataclysmic event, its full dimensions gradually revealed. Jimmy grew up in a world split between corporate compounds (gated communities metastasized into city-states) and pleeblands (unsafe, populous and polluted urban centers). His best friend was "Crake," the name originally his handle in an interactive Net game, Extinctathon. Even Jimmy's mother-who ran off and joined an ecology guerrilla group when Jimmy was an adolescent-respected Crake, already a budding genius. The two friends first encountered Oryx on the Net; she was the eight-year-old star of a pedophilic film on a site called HottTotts. Oryx's story is a counterpoint to Jimmy and Crake's affluent adolescence. She was sold by her Southeast Asian parents, taken to the city and eventually made into a sex "pixie" in some distant country. Jimmy meets Oryx much later-after college, after Crake gets Jimmy a job with ReJoovenEsence. Crake is designing the Crakers-a new, multicolored placid race of human beings, smelling vaguely of citron. He's procured Oryx to be his personal assistant. She teaches the Crakers how to cope in the world and goes out on secret missions. The mystery on which this riveting, disturbing tale hinges is how Crake and Oryx and civilization vanished, and how Jimmy-who also calls himself "the Snowman," after that other rare, hunted specimen, the Abominable Snowman-survived. Chesterton once wrote of the "thousand romances that lie secreted in The Origin of Species." Atwood has extracted one of the most hair-raising of them, and one of the most brilliant. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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