Oryx and Crake
Margaret Atwood, 2003
★ 4.00 from 296.6k ratings on Goodreads
Fantasy Science fictionRomanceLiterary fiction
A man called Snowman survives on a beach among green-eyed children, haunted by a world of engineered animals and lost time. Atwood’s speculative dystopia of memory and myth. Unease and memory press through a slow, dry voice, with flashes of wonder at engineered nature and power gone wrong.
Feels like unease, wonder and longing. About memory, power and nature.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy bleak speculative worlds, fragmented memory, and moral unease more than tidy answers. Be prepared for a slow, sometimes confusing middle and a cold, unpleasant tone; some readers also find the science and character work thin.
Why read it
It offers a sharp thought experiment about engineered life and human carelessness, told through memory and myth rather than lecture.
A page from the book
What children invent about you can outlast what you know about yourself.
He gives the same answer. Even over such a short time - two months, three? He’s lost count - they’ve accumulated a stock of lore, of conjecture about him: Snowman was once a bird but he’s forgotten how to fly and the rest of his feathers fell out, and so he is cold and he needs a second skin, and he has to wrap himself up. No: he’s cold because he eats fish, and fish are cold. No: he wraps himself up because he’s missing his man thing, and he doesn’t want us to see. That’s why he won’t go swimming. Snowman has wrinkles because he once lived underwater and it wrinkled up his skin. Snowman is sad because the others like him flew away over the sea, and now he is all alone. What readers say
Readers often describe this as a disturbing, bleak, and thought-provoking dystopia, with many fascinated by its imaginative warning and compelled by Jimmy’s story. Others found it slow, confusing, or unpleasant, and some disliked its science and character work.
Margaret Atwood.Atwood has called the novel “speculative fiction” rather than science fiction: it invents no technology that violates known science.
Books that feel like this
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Margaret Atwood, 1985
A woman survives in a theocratic state where her body is a resource; her wry, precise voice reports the daily cost of obedience.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is Oryx and Crake for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy bleak speculative worlds, fragmented memory, and moral unease more than tidy answers. Be prepared for a slow, sometimes confusing middle and a cold, unpleasant tone; some readers also find the science and character work thin.
- What is Oryx and Crake like?
- Unease and memory press through a slow, dry voice, with flashes of wonder at engineered nature and power gone wrong. Feels like unease, wonder and longing. About memory, power and nature.
- What should I read after Oryx and Crake?
- If you liked Oryx and Crake, try The Passage (Justin Cronin), Klara and the Sun (Kazuo Ishiguro) and The Street Lawyer (John Grisham).
A taste of the feed
A mother’s suspicion that love may be a superstition we haven’t outgrown.
I think I hate Capaldi because deep down I suspect he may be right. That what he claims is true. That science has now proved beyond doubt there’s nothing so unique about my daughter, nothing there our modern tools can’t excavate, copy, transfer. That people have been living with one another all this time, centuries, loving and hating each other, and all on a mistaken premise. A kind of superstition we kept going while we didn’t know better.
Klara and the Sun · Kazuo Ishiguro
When authority is challenged by brutality, the line between life and death evaporates.
“Put that gun down,” Rafter ordered from the doorway, and a split second later another shot rang through the reception area, a shot that went into the ceiling somewhere well above Rafter’s head and reduced him to a mere mortal. Turning the gun back to me, he nodded, and I complied, entering the conference room behind Rafter. The last thing I saw on the outside was Madam Devier shaking at her desk, terror-stricken, headset around her neck, high heels parked neatly next to her wastebasket.
The Street Lawyer · John Grisham
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