28 March 2013: given the announcement that Amazon is now goodreads, I am now boycotting goodreads until this changes. SHAME ON GOODREADS.

You can find this review here now:

http://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpres...

Snowman has spent a terrible night, full of confused, whiskey-sodden dreams, and when the Children of Crake call to him from the bottom of his tree he is still mostly asleep.

"You don't exist!" he shouts. "You're not even characters in a Margaret Atwood novel! You're just part of a review. And Manny won't write it until Jordan's finished the book as well."

None of this makes sense to Snowman, and it makes even less sense to the Children of Crake.

"What is a novel?" asks Eleanor Roosevelt.

"And who More...

So, you go to Wal-Mart to buy your groceries because it's so damn cheap, but then you realize Wal-Mart is hiring very few full-time employees and not offering reasonable health care to its employees and it's walking employees through the process of how to get Medicare, not to mention they're closing down small businesses by exploiting foreign economies to get the lowest possible fucking cost; so, Wal-Mart's making YOU pay medical benefits for ITS employees, and replacing good jobs with shitty on More...

Futuristic, bad new world in the wake of an unspecified environmental/ genetic engineering disaster, told from the viewpoint of a nostalgic but detached survivor. It is as much about personal relationships, sexual exploitation, sexual freedom, religion, creation and original sin as it is cyber-punk sci-fi. The central, though unoriginal, irony is that this dystopia was created from a failed Utopian plan.

O&C is parallel with "The Year of the Flood" (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...), More...

I wonder if all Margaret Atwoods books are like this one? Having read "Oryx and Crake" and "The Handmaid's Tale," I am curious now how many other ways of horrifying me she has up her sleeve.

"Oryx and Crake" is a dystopian (or as Atwood calls it herself, a speculative fiction) novel set in a future where genetic engineering rules the world. The story is told from the POV of Snowman, a seemingly last Homo sapiens sapiens on Earth. He is surrounded by the new breed of humans - passive, docile Chil More...

Geez. That was the most depressing apocalypse ever.

A guy called Snowman is playing caretaker and prophet to a strange new race of people he calls the Crakers in the ruins of civilization. As Snowman forages for supplies, his recollections make up the story of what caused a massive biological and ecological disaster that has apparently wiped all the old humans out except for him.

Snowman’s past takes place in our near future where he was once known as Jimmy in a society where genetic engineering w More...

I've read a lot of dystopian future books, and this was by far the most unsettling of the bunch. I think one of the reasons I enjoy reading these types of novels is the plausibility that surrounds the settings they take place in, and Oryx and Crake struck me as far more plausible than any of the others I've read. Partly because it doesn't take place all that far in the future, and partly because most of technology that the story depends on already exists, or is right around the corner. I think m More...

I'm coming back to the authors who marked my literary 'coming of age': Vonnegut, Atwood. These two, for me, are the grand-daddy and grand-mammy of my bookish adolescence. They were life rafts held out by a couple of high school teachers. I grabbed them and held on. I simply cannot review either properly, so wrapped in nostalgia is my own point of view; so personal my reaction. I'm reading them now to see how they hold up and what they have to say to me 30 years later; and in Atwood's case, to pi More...

I'm struggling to pin a rating on this book. Atwood, as always, is a beautiful writer. The first fifty or so pages I drank up her language, her description and setting. But I have to confess that I didn't like the book. Part of that could be as a parent (of an 8-year-old girl no less) there were parts of Oryx's history that I struggled to read. Child pornography (and abuse) is about the only thing that makes we want to get violent and start castrating guys. After reading that section, I struggle More...

This is the first book I've ever read by Margaret Atwood. I wrote a story years ago that people told me was a lot like "The Handmaid's Tale" and since have been afraid to read her out of fear of connection. I grew out of it but figured I'd start with a more recent work. I liked this book a whole lot, and if it weren't for a few parts in the book, I might have given it four or even five stars. The story was dark and moving throughout and kept me interested to the very end. The problem was that se More...

I first read this book back in 2006 when post-apocalyptic books weren't all the rage yet. To me, this book was jawdropping, I hadn't read anything even remotely like it and it quickly earned a spot on my favourites shelf.
Now, six years and many post-apocalyptic books later, I revisited it, and it still hasn't lost its brilliance in many ways.

This is not a fast paced book, there is plenty of internalizing and describing. It brings up a lot of ethical issues about where science is heading. Where More...

From my blog:

This book was creep-tastically good. Seriously. Reading it disqueted my soul in a way that made me lose my appetite and really hope that this is fiction and not prophecy.

Atwood has a knack for writing dystopian novels that are set in the near-enough future to be completely relevant. She basically takes things that we have today, and stretches them into a terrifying future (as she did in the Handmaid's Tale, one of my all-time favorite books). In Oryx and Crake, genetic engineering, More...

A mainstream author writing science fiction badly. Basically, tries to have it both ways: referencing real-world, present-day biotechnology without bothering to be accurate about it. I didn't enjoy reading it, and I don't like the implication-- that writing SF just involves throwing terminology around. One wouldn't have much patience for a legal thriller that ignored basic courtroom procedure; one wouldn't have much patience for a medical drama that got human anatomy wrong. I don't have much pat More...

Uh, this is getting a bit squicky.

I'm having a hard time putting this book down. It's been a while since that has happened. I really must stop reading it and work but it's so good.

I don't know how to feel about this book. I finished reading it so I'm re-reading it in between other books but the idea of a post-Apocalyptic world is so upsetting to me to put it mildly. All I can do is go, scientists, please do not destroy the world or give everyone some kind of disease because I really love the wor More...

I started this book knowing that this is a post-apocalyptic novel. I knew that Snowman had survived some sort of mass destruction of mankind because of an experiment gone awry and is fighting for survival. The story started with Snowman sleeping in a tree, waking up in a survival mode, with the last of his provisions. He then observes the children at a distance, obviously not surprised or afraid of them. They knew him as they approached him and chanted his name, “Snowman, oh Snowman.” Who are th More...

Like A Handmaid's Tale and mumble's Mumble Mumble Mumble*, Oryx and Crake is a dystopian novel exploring the post-apocalyptic future of sex and the human race by following a small number of characters very closely.

In this case, the main character appears to be the only member of homo sapiens left alive, and the sole caretaker of a new human-like species, the Children of Crake, genetically re-engineered to be peaceful, happy, naturally insect-repellant vegans perfectly suited to their environmen More...

One of the (many) things that has always struck me as ridiculous about the concept of creationism - sorry, sorry, "intelligent design" - is the idea that an infinitely kind and intelligent god designed human beings, and yet this is the best he could do. Give me some ultimate power, and I could design a better species. One not so prone to runny noses and cancer, for starters. One where the trachea and esophagus don't share an opening - that might cut down on that pesky "choking" thing. And, you k More...

Margaret Atwood began scaring me with Handmaiden's Tale. I thought it wouldn't happen again, but it did. This book was frighting

I am sure it is well-written, but I simply could not get into it. Not my style...

I'm not going to tell you what this book is about - plenty of other reviews spend more than enough time on that already as it is, seems redundant to me if you ask me when we already have a book description on the book-page :P I will tell you this though: this book is a frightful example of where genetic experimentation might take us in a not so distant future, if the genetic scientists continue to go down the path that they have been on for two decades, or more.

This books makes me wonder if we More...

1. The novelization of Talking Heads' Fear of Music.

2. Not a little of Neil Patrick Harris circa Starship Troopers in Crake.

3. He'd been unhappy too, of course. It went without saying, his unhappiness. He'd put a lot of energy into it. (pgs. 71-72)

4. Docked a WHOLE STAR for that vague-ass ending. Up to that point, that last page, it was a five star read.

5. Sadly, Alex the parrot died in Sept. 2007: Alex died quickly. He had a sudden, unexpected catastrophic event associated with arteroscleros More...

I thought I had read this before, but I hadn't really - I had skimmed it. Wasn't the right time - after my son was born in 96 I had been far too vulnerable and avoided all dystopian literature. It seems this year I am again ready as I'll ever be - The Road, then this!

This was even better than The Handmaid's Tale. Funny as hell yet dark and foreboding because this future has already started, not just scientifically but the path humans follow is utterly within our nature and more than feasible if More...

The thing that creeps me out the most about this story, is just how plausible it is. It's really not a stretch to say that in the not-so-distant future the world will be run by giant corporations, and science will cross over ethical boundaries in pursuit of profit for said corporations. It kind of makes me sad ... and somewhat afraid of the grocery store.
I enjoyed reading this book for her prose, the well written characters, and the questions it raised about the current state of our society.
A th More...

No other genre has ideas that blow me away by their sheer creativity and in their butchered execution than science fiction. Amid plot clichés, bad dialogue, monstrously superfluous text, made-up technology solutions, and the flat-out lack of effort sci-fi writers put in to a genre that should be the most innovative—sacrificing cohesiveness for whim, new territory for old innovation cum stale sci-fi law, relying on the fan base to simply buy everything—one subgenre has remained faithful to good s More...

Atwood's position on this book is that it is not, in fact, sci-fi: since there are no elements of the universe that don't already exist (albeit in an extremely exaggerated form in Atwood's world), she calls this a work of "speculative fiction." I'm not sure that her distinction makes much of a difference as far as the experience of the novel, but it is jarring as a reader to take a step back and realize we're a couple of wrong turns away from precisely the sort of world(s) (both pre- and post-ap More...

eh.

bore-x and crake. this is a very all right book. i was just unwowed by it. initially, i liked the pacing of the book, and the way the story was spooling out between the present and past, doling its secrets out in dribs and drabs. but the characters just seemed so flimsy, and i was ultimately left with more questions than explanations. and the cutesy futuristic products and consumer culture bits are best left in the hands of a george saunders, not the queen of the long pen. however - and this More...

Revision, 6.26.09: Not that it's that important, but I have changed my rating to 3 stars. The more I thought about it . . . and I'm sure Margaret Atwood will survive the disappointment.

Not since Beloved have I read a book that was so well done but so depressing that I could hardly continue at many points. I thought of giving it 3 stars just because of the sheer misery of the story, but, of course, this is Margaret Atwood, and both the quality of the writing and the details of the story are deser More...

This book took me FOREVER to get through. Normally, I love Margaret Atwood, but I never really got into this book. It's post-apocalyptic and deals with issues around genetic modification. Interesting topic, and I wound up sticking with it until the end, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it. Maybe it was just me as every one else seems to rate it pretty highly.