Oryx and Crake

In Margaret Atwood's 11th novel, she returns to the sci-fi concerns and social criticism that propelled THE HANDMAID'S TALE. ORYX AND CRAKE follows the fortunes of a man once named Jimmy, now called Snowman: his present-day life as a scavenger in a blasted world alternates with his memories of his past. The eponymous Oryx is an Asian girl he encounters on a website featuring child pornography, and Crake is a brilliantly gifted childhood friend who grows up to be a scientist involved in creating artificial life. A New York Times Notable Book for 2003. New York Times Book Review: "What Atwood's inventive treatment of first and last things lacks is a plausible psychological basis....We can take in only so many confected scenarios of future life before we crave a complexity of character commensurate with the intelligence of the plot or the confident excellence of the writing. Alas, it is not to be. The characters' background stories feel somewhat arbitrarily assigned, and their actions are conditioned at every turn by the logic of the premise....But...a novel like ORYX AND CRAKE can address the present-day world in a way that crates a powerful para-literary experience. What tones we lose through the lack of true complexity of character are to some degree compensated for by the peculiar triangulation that obtains among reader, novel and world."