ORYX & CRAKE by Margaret Atwood (Vintage Press, 2009) – MaddAddam Trilogy #1
The world of Oryx & Crake resembles a corrupted and desolate Garden of Eden. There’s plenty of irony and black humour but ultimately this is a bleak dystopian vision of the near future. Planet Earth is in a sorry state wherein “The whole world is now one vast controlled experiment”.
Against a backdrop of thinly veiled class conflict between the privileged world of the ‘Compounds’ and the dispossessed zones of the Pleeblands, we take no encouragement from re-engineered humans (Children Of Crake) who are little more than benign zombies.
Margaret Atwood throws in a plethora of apocalyptic elements, any one of which would be enough to strike the death knell for humanity. Taken all together this looks like being the end of the world as we know it. Continue reading
