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by: Margaret Atwood
Binding: Hardcover
Format: Bargain Price
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 400
Publication Date: May 06, 2003
Sales Rank: 94772
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
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.
This is Margaret Atwood at the absolute peak of her powers. For readers of Oryx and Crake, nothing will ever look the same again.
The narrator of Atwood's riveting novel calls himself Snowman. When the story opens, he is sleeping in a tree, wearing an old bedsheet, mourning the loss of his beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. He searches for supplies in a wasteland where 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 he left with nothing but his haunting memories? Alone except for the 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.
With breathtaking command of her shocking material, and with her customary sharp wit and dark humour, Atwood projects us into an outlandish yet wholly believable realm populated by characters who will continue to inhabit our dreams long after the last chapter. This is Margaret Atwood at the absolute peak of her powers.
Amazon.com Review:
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
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - The second best book I've ever read.
Brilliant, evocative, worth every word. Margaret Atwood proved herself to me in this book, the first I've read by her.
Every sentence shows you something new, respecting the reader's right to dig through imagery instead of sort through narratorial proclamations, resulting in an ending few chapters that are sure to leave you breathless.
This book is on the shelf waiting to be read a second time. LOVE it.
Oh, and the best book I've ever read is Being Dead, by ... Read More
Rating: - Corknut
I feel ashamed because I had to look up the spelling of dystopian and the tireless Margaret - I have it on good authority - did research out the wazoo, spending several days w/ the real Alex the Parrot (who did not care for how he was portrayed). I hit the Chickie-Nuggets section in the famously healthy (and possibly humorless) Angelica Cafe. I was reminded at times of the tv series Lost (probably because of the weather). And Children of Men (probably because of the Scotch, Clive Owen's and Snowman's, ... Read More
Rating:  - Disappointing Ending
While I won't reveal the ending of the book (no spoilers here) I will tell you that it is wholly unsatisfying.
While the book addresses many of life's questions eloquently in the way that many sci-fi books before it have (ie doesn't cover any new ground and so you won't be missing out on any earth shattering revelations by passing it up) the book doesn't follow the sort of intro-build up-climax-conclusion format that you might be expecting or pining for.
The book opens a lot of ... Read More
Rating: - Good 'til the last drop -- then not.
I love Margaret Atwood's writing, what little of it I've seen -- an essay or two in school textbooks and The Handmaid's Tale, one of my favorite books-that-disturbed-me. This one I picked up because it's science fiction, which is cool, and because I absolutely love the title. Both are the names of extinct animals, and are the adopted names of two of the characters (the third goes by both "Snowman," as in Abominable, and "Thickney," another extinct animal that fits in beautifully: oryx and crake and thickney, ... Read More
Rating: - The end of the world as we know it?
In "Oryx and Crake," Margaret Atwood takes the world today and fast-forwards to a possible outcome for humanity. Science rules in the world of tomorrow, with all of humanity's problems being solved by genetic engineering. Though humans are still subject to the conditions of their environment - rising sea levels have flooded coastal areas and UV levels are intolerably high due to a reduced ozone layer - man is gradually coming to control its world, including climate-controlling rocks and artificial, engineered ... Read More
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