Not sci-fi, but speculative fiction

Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (Random House, 2003)

The back-cover synopsis of Oryx and Crake states, "This is Margaret Atwood at the absolute peak of her powers." Very true. If Atwood did not possess such literary power, I would have closed the book when it began to recount Oryx's history of poverty, captivity, and sexual exploitation, and would never have opened it again. I normally can't stand to read about that kind of subject matter. But Atwood is so compelling that I pushed through my revulsion and finished this unhappy novel. It was great, and I don't know where to begin.

Of course, the "speculative" vision is clever and precise and plausible. It takes no great imaginative leap to imagine biotech experiments gone awry. Nor the corporatization of health care, law and order, education, and property ownership. Nor the elimination of the middle class, as the human population becomes divided between those protected from biological threat, and those not.

What (perhaps?) separates Atwood from other writers of the genre, is that she fetishizes her vision less. The story is not simply about the world she has created. For instance, she might have had her hero, Snowman/Jimmy, move restlessly around the world, exploring both the compounds and the unprotected "pleeblands" (presumably "plebian lands"), discovering many more juicy details of the dystopia. (Director James Cameron once said of Titanic that he made it a love story because it allowed him to show every part of the ship. Thus the movie was about the ship more than the characters.) But Jimmy's perspective is always narrow and biased, and his emotions, not the structures of the society he inhabits, drive the most consequential actions in the novel. I like that. There are always the grand narratives of science and society, but it is good ol' familial loss and heartbreak that shape the characters most profoundly - not just Jimmy (whom Atwood has called a "romantic"), but also Crake, who is an idealist, not a realist. In the end, people are people, even when they are non-people. The book ends as the Children of Crake, defying their creator's every intention, turn to myth and worship in order to make sense of their existence.