One day, something is going to be the end of the world as we know it. Superbacteria and/or a global plague. Nuclear war. Heck, maybe the zombie apocalypse. But why not climate change? In Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, it's climate that creates the void into which increasingly powerful corporations pour themselves. Soon, the divide between the haves and the have-nots becomes even more literal, with the highly-educated few retreating into city-esque complexes created and owned by business interests, while the masses are walled off into their own zones. Jimmy is born into privilege, to a mother and father who are good worker bees, and it is in the compound school that he meets Glenn, who becomes his best friend...and who ends up changing the world beyond what anyone could have imagined.

As an adult, Jimmy has renamed himself Snowman (after The Abominable), and as far as he knows, he's the last "real" human left alive. There's a group of genetically engineered people, the Children of Crake, but they're not the same. He's left alone, in a devastated world, with only his memories and his guilt over the role he played in it all. These memories make up the bulk of the book, with very little actually happening in an actual plot sense. Jimmy does venture back to the last place he lived in search of food and sunscreen and medicine, which forces him to confront what happened with Glenn, who became Crake, and the beautiful, reserved Oryx, who was involved with them both. How they died, and how the virus that wreaked havoc on the rest of the world was released.

It's a character study as much as a work of speculative fiction, and that's really Atwood's strength anyways. She loves to dig into the ways our little flaws can set in motion events that spiral out of control, to take the tensions underlying society and drag them up into the open. I find it really interesting that this book was written in 2003, the year I graduated high school, because so much of it seems to apply to the kinds of debates that continue to be relevant even now: just because we have the technology or knowledge to do something, does that mean we should? How do we weigh morality? Whose morality gets weighed? The writing date of the book does mean there are some things that come off anachronistic (she posits a world focused on disc-based storage, in which email is a primary communication method), a lot of it is startlingly prescient.

Clearly I liked it, but it was not without failings. The biggest, for me, was its lack of developed female characters. Jimmy's mother is intriguing, but we see relatively little of her and through mostly his eyes, reflecting on the way her choices impacted him. Oryx remains to the reader just as mystifying as she largely is to Jimmy, and while I could see Atwood intending this as a statement of how men tend to project their own stories only the women they claim to love (Jimmy is convinced he knows parts of Oryx's past, which she herself denies), I wish we'd gotten more of her perspective. And as much as I enjoy character-driven novels, I wish it had been structured differently, so that it was taking place in the present rather than largely in the past. These are relatively minor issues, though. On the whole, this book is fascinating and thought-provoking and one I'd recommend widely (though maybe not younger/less sophisticated teenagers). ( )

Whomever payed attention to the last 3 years and ever had the change to read Oryx and Crake will certainly notice the familiarity between Atwood's sharp depiction of a pre- and post-apolitical world and the world of today. Going back to a naive 2005 when I first read this book, I imagine if Atwood's dystopia lies in the realm of prophecy, analytical prediction or just a pure and vivid fantastic fiction. One thing is for sure, the naive fascination and deep admiration for her work that I felt as a first time reader remains untouched despite the sight of a future that looks each day more like fiction. ( )

Sometida a los estragos de una terrible plaga; la humanidad afronta una azarosa huida hacia adelante. En esta primera entrega de la trilogía de MADDADDAM ?que se completa con El año del Diluvio y Maddaddam?; Margaret Atwood nos invita a adentrarnos en un futuro tan verosímil como inquietante. Conocido como Jimmy antes de que el planeta se viese asolado por una serie de desastres naturales; Hombre de las Nieves llora la pérdida de Crake; su mejor amigo; y de la esquiva Oryx; de quien ambos estaban enamorados; mientras lucha por sobrevivir en soledad sobre la faz de la Tierra. A merced de los elementos; acechado por los recuerdos y sin más compañía que la de los Hijos de Crake; esos seres de ojos verdes que lo consideran una especie de profeta; Hombre de las Nieves se pregunta cómo ha podido cambiar todo en tan poco tiempo y emprende un doble viaje hacia su pasado y hacia la burbuja de alta tecnología creada por Crake; el lugar donde empezó todo. La crítica ha dicho... «Un retrato feroz de la globalización y de un mundo que se desgarra por sus costuras ecológicas ( )

I finished this book in under 5 hours, it was amazing and completely absorbing and this wasn't even the first time I've read it. It's such a scary realistic view of what our future could be. I loved it. ( )

It seems like it took forever to finish this book. I've only read one other book by Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale), so I decided to check out some more of her writings. I was very disappointed in this one. I thought it was poorly written & the ending was just terrible. ( )