Oryx & Crake / Margaret Atwood

 

4 out of 5 stars

Margaret Atwood is one of my favourite Canadian authors and I find her work consistently thought provoking, entertaining, and humorous. I get her dry sense of humour. (When my mother was alive, we used to have spirited debates about the relevant merits of Margaret Laurence (her choice) vs. Margaret Atwood (mine). No resolution was ever reached.)

This book was published a few years before The World Without Us and the tv show Life After People and shows Atwood's usual skill at having her finger on the pulse of our current worries. She tells interviewers regularly that she uses the news and current research directions to inform her fiction, that she doesn't invent details that don't have some basis in fact. This attention to reality makes her look like a prophetess from time to time.

Having been living through the Covid-19 pandemic, her description of the spread of virus through this fictional world seemed spot on. The attempts to quarantine people, the hysteria, and the desire to flee the sites of contagion have all been evident over the last couple of years. If her predictions of the changes to climate illustrated here also come true, we will be living in a most uncomfortable world.

I'm glad to have finally met Snowman, Oryx, and Crake. The novel ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, so I'll definitely want to read The Year of the Flood when I reach it in my reading list.

Book number 422 of my Science Fiction & Fantasy Reading Project.