Margaret Atwood gets weird, y’all

A coworker recommended this one after I’d said I’d watched and really, really liked Alias Grace. Before this, the only Atwood book I had read was Handmaid’s Tale and while this also deals with a dystopian future and the end of humanity as we know it, it’s more of a science fiction than philosophical end. It is also waaaay too clearly just the first book in a series. Like The Hobbit took one book and divided it into three movies – I feel like Oryx and Crake took one movie and is milking three books out of it. It didn’t feel like enough happened for how much I read, and that includes the end of civilization as we know it.

This is another book that jumps backwards and forwards in time because going chronologically would be too normal and spoil everything. We meet Snowman (Jimmy, in flashbacks) who seems to be the last surviving human. He has lived on his own for at least a decade, alongside a humanoid species for whom he is the connection to god. He is not god, but he knows how to ring the guy up and he knows all the stories. See, god was his buddy Crake and he created this new species to be people, but better. And scientifically, medically better. And he got to decide what “better” meant in the first place. Plus there’s a girl. There’s always a girl.

We also flash back occasionally to the world that created this. There is a massive divide between the haves and the have-nots that isn’t even touched on in this book (I expect we’ll get to it in book two or three). Maybe I’ve just read too much dystopian fiction, but it just didn’t feel like it was adding anything to the genre. I’ll probably read the other two, but I’m in no rush.