OCT - Oryx and Crake

October review for Eclectic Reader's Challenge 2016: Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, 2003. [Man Booker Prize Shortlist category]

I'm not even sure how to start writing about Oryx and Crake. It is a strange book, not that I expected anything less from Margaret Atwood. The Handmaid's Tale has long held a spot atop my list of favorite feminist fiction, and I've been interested to see what else Atwood can do. Oryx and Crake has been described as post-apocalyptic, speculative fiction, adventure romance, and a number of other things, and it is the idea of "speculative fiction" that I think I got hung up on the most. Atwood has a way of resonating even today; I re-read Handmaid's Tale during the Obama-Romney election of 2012 and it was chilling in the context of the reproductive rights fight. Reading Oryx and Crake and then thinking about it in these post-election weeks (yes, super late review) was chilling in a different way. In this dystopia, science is paramount and genetic engineering rules (ruled) the world. The narrator, Snowman, is ostensibly the only human of his kind left as he relates his life and the catastrophe that brought him to this moment, living mostly in a tree and acting as a sort of half-assed prophet to the newly synthesized Children of Crake. He tells of his old friend whom he refers to as Crake, how he climbed the scientific ladder at a genetics corporation and created these new beings devoid of emotion and sexual drive. The possibility of this future is not necessarily what chills, instead it is the possibility of its decline under the next presidency. Science may not be on the top of the agenda in Trump's America and while we may avoid bringing about Oryx and Crake, we may be on the precipice of a dystopia of another kind. 

At any rate, back to the narrative. The most controversial aspect of Snowman's tale is the genetic engineering, the idea of "playing God," and "how much is too much, how far is too far?" (p206).  The truth is that most of today's technology could fall under the scope of "playing God" in some indirect manner or another, from modern medicine to weather apps, and but the "how far is too far" is quite apropos, placing the impetus on the individual. After all, "God is a cluster of neurons, he'd maintained," Snowman says of Crake's philosophy. "The whole world is now one vast uncontrolled experiment." (p228) What is the future without innovation and drive?

Snowman/Jimmy often talks about his love of language, how early on he had collected old words, "He developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them." (p195) One of my favorite parts of the book, when I felt the most aligned with the narrator, who spent a portion of his post-graduate life as a glorified copywriter for a drug company, fomenting the change in lifestyle brought about with science as paramount. It is a slight nod to the future we find Snowman in, the last of his kind, trying to remember the names of everyday objects to keep himself sane, forcing himself to "Hang on to the words... When they're gone out of his head... they'll be gone, everywhere, for ever. As if they had never existed." I am hoping to collect such words, such books, to keep them for myself and for posterity.

I am unsure how to end this post, or what it was even about in the first place, but that is pretty much how I felt when I finished Oryx and Crake, so I guess it's in keeping with the narrative.