Anyone reading this one yet? It sounds fantastic. Hopefully (fingers crossed) it will arrive on Mother’s Day.
And She made msnbc.com today:
“TORONTO, May 9 — Just as Toronto begins to relax after weeks of worrying about SARS, celebrated hometown author Margaret Atwood is releasing a novel about a deadly virus that wipes out civilization.“Oryx and Crake” by the Booker Prize-winning author about life after a deadly virus is bound to touch a few nerves in her home country and around a world still plagued with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which has killed 500 globally.”
Anyway, I am so happy that Blind Assassin wasn’t the final novel…will be back as I read. How about you?
I’ll be reading it - but the scenario reminds me a lot of Ronald Wright’s brilliant A Scientific Romance (last man exploring Britain after apocalyptic collapse of civilisation due to global warming and plagues). Judging by talk on the UK SF circuit, I’m not the only one to feel antagonised by the prior publicity, where Atwood repeatedly claims that O&C (despite its premise being well-trodden SF territory) as something other than science fiction. She stereotypes SF as rocket ships, Martians, teleportation, chemicals, etc, and sees O&C as “fact within fiction” instead. See, for instance, this New Scientist interview.
Read it a month or so ago ( I’m in the book biz) and enjoyed it immensely. Without giving too much away, I thought one aspect of the world was Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” taken to the next logical step. Gated communities become gated city-states become corporately-owned gated city-states.
I find it odd to see it promoted as a “Mother’s Day book” what with its heavy-duty SF themes of apocalypse, genetic engineering, etc. not to mention child pornography. I bet there were a few perplexed moms this weeked.
Everytime I pass a KFC with their new “Boneless Chicken Wings” I have to shout “ChickieNubs!” You’ll know I mean soon.
I’m on page 60 and am pretty sure I’ll be done with it before the week is out. I am enjoying it and will be anxious to hear others input after I finish reading it.
And about a year ago she came to my alma mater to speak and she was just incredible to listen to and she certainly did not sound then like she would cease writing anytime soon. In fact, I got quite the opposite feeling, like as long as there was breath in her body, she would be writing.
Got to agree with raygirvan - the NS interview thoroughly annoyed me, especially where she criticised SF for being fiction while her work was factual, and then admitted she had used certain “axioms.” I’m probably being very unfair, but she came across as an intellectual snob and I didn’t enjoy Handmaid’s Tale that much, so…
I suspect the Mother’s Day promotion as being part of the strategy to push this to a non-SF readership who won’t be in a position to compare it with previous SF. Of interest, there’s an excerpt and (aak!) a glossary of terms at the promotional website.
Hmmm. I just refreshed my memory by skimming my copy of Wright’s “A Scientific Romance”. It’s about a man exploring a post-apocalyptic Britain - the apocalypse caused by global warming and various plagues including one called RISC (Rapid Immune System Collapse) - slowly uncovering via flashback the events that led to this situation, including a triangular relationship involving the narrator, his best friend and a woman they both loved … and he meets a race of genetically engineered humans that don’t understand him. Anyone still think O&C is startlingly original?
Margaret Atwood has explored many different mediums and genres. I have never been dissappointed by any of her works. She does not strive for acceptance from followers of a particular genre. I think she has once again out done herself. I am dissappointed to hear all of the controversy regarding her latest novel Oryx and Crake. I agree with her when she labels it as “speculative fiction”. It does not follow the proper formula for traditional science fiction. She includes many details that seem futuristic, but are in fact very apparent in our world today. She has once again exposed her fears and used that as a tool to speculate about the future and the direction that the modern world is clearly heading. The heart of the novel is not the state in which Snowman is living, rather the attrocities that occured on the road to the final collapse. I have to prasie Margaret Atwood for courage to expose many real issues that we face today, for example… child exploitation/ prostution, genetic engineering, corporate greed, our fixation with physical perfection and longevity, class war and the elimination of the middle class, economic and intellectual disparities and also virtual violence. I end this novel reminding myself that I need to find a safe place.
Regardless what you label it, it is a great book. And if you think Margaret Atwood is mocking Science Fiction, well… I guess you just don’t get her quirky sense of humor.
Just finished it last night, and wow. It’s going to stick with me for a long time. I’d love to discuss the book after more people have had time to read it. It’s disturbing and darkly humorous and I read it every spare minute I had.
I recently finished it and also really enjoyed it. Did anyone else think of the urban legend about KFC (they had to change their name because they weren’t using real chicken but some sort of mutated chicken-like blob) when she mentioned the ChickieNobs?
About the end
I had the feeling that he was going to kill the other survivors. His loyalty to Oryx would probably override anything else including his loneliness. He said he would take care of them and I think he would be true to that. Also I had the feeling the his death was emanate and that he wouldn’t be around much longer to watch over them so he would have to get rid of the treat before he died.
I totally thought about KFC. I will not eat KFC after my girlfriend in high school…a manager at a KFC in Canada bit into a chicken nugget (chickienobs, hehe) and bit right into a cyst. No shit. She sued he comapny and got 15 grand out of the deal. Not much money, but to a high school girl it was plenty enough to buy a car.
Speaking of Margaret Atwood. Has anyone read The Robber Bride? Have any of you ever crossed paths with a bitch vixen like Zenia? And Tony, Charis and Roz…grrrr I could just shake them.:mad:
Crake really shook me. What on earth was going on in his mind? Why did he have to wipe out humanity? Why couldn’t he just bring his BlyssPluss pills to market and wait for them to work? They seemed like a good thing to me!
He had such a high opinion of himself that he arrogated to himself the Divine privilege, judging mankind, finding it devoid of worth and deciding to wipe the slate clean so that his Noble Savages will inherit the world. There isn’t a Hell hot enough for him.