Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood

"What if we continue down the road we're already on? How slippery is the slope? What are our saving graces? Who's got the will to stop us?" These, the author's own words, preface this 2003 Booker Prize nominee, framing a dystopian story with similarly chilling, end-is-nigh themes to her most famous work, The Handmaid's Tale. The dystopian-fiction genre is one rich with possibility, but originality can be elusive. To be effective, the future-shocks need to play on genuine trepidation and fears rather than simply playing lazy Orwellian tribute (Ben Elton's Blind Faith, for example). Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, evoking allusions to ...  Read the complete review

Just before Christmas I spent a couple of days on the train to and from work with my head inside a lurid hardback, lime green spotted with neon pink and blue. The south west trains announcer ellicted wide smiles of joy in me every time he announced a delay, while my fellow commuters scowled and buried their faces deeper into their scarves I almost jumped for joy, since it meant I could gobble up a few more pages of this deliciously cynical book. Few people can fail to have heard of Margaret Atwood, the woman has a hoard of prizes and prize nominations under her belt, not to mention a long list of critically acclaimed novels. This, the latest work of fiction to ...  Read the complete review

Some of you might be aware that Margaret Atwood is a favourite author of mine for some very simple reasons. Her stories are interesting, thought provoking, full of beautiful and intelligent descriptions and phrases and her novels and poems are just extremely well written. Not surprisingly, Margaret Atwood has won numerous awards over the years for her work and still produces the most fascinating and interesting work today that keeps me enthralled. The last Atwood I read however, was "Cats Eye" which I found a huge disappointment (see review! ;) but I thought I'd return to what Atwood does best; dystopian science fiction. I first fell in love with ...  Read the complete review

Good, decent, speculative, science fiction. This work is thankfully less self-indulgent than the influential 'A Handmaid's Tale'. In the latter, and in other books I assume, Atwood has proved she can write her socks off, and do it darkly, pessimistically and as a great, long warning. Her works mirror certain classics, such as '1984' by George Orwell, only 'A Handmaid's Tale' was a reminder that such repression is actually happening today in other parts of the world, and mostly, to women. I mention this because Atwood is the perfect writer to take on the Aldous Huxley vision in 'Brave New World' (full of ideas but not poetically written - Huxley was more ...  Read the complete review

Margaret Atwood and her publishers have denied that Atwood's new novel Oryx and Crake is science fiction. This is, of course, a matter of marketing and not literary precision. In fact, Oryx and Crake stands directly in a lineage that began with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Representative of a literary mode that could not exist outside of science fiction, it is the type of novel that seeks to prevent the future by describing the events that have brought it about in all it`s ugly glory. After reading this I`m in the mood for a little Word-play so let's call it a "Cassandraism" Novel (after the daughter of Troy whose prophecies were not to be ...  Read the complete review