Oryx and Crake

Just finished Margaret Atwood's novel Oryx and Crake yesterday. Fascinating and deeply troubling book. I put my take on it up on GoodReads, and I'll repost it here.

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fantastically written, crushingly depressing. I love and hate this book. Searingly pessimistic view of human nature.

I have a friend who charges Atwood with being 'anti-science' in The Handmaid's Tale and has expressed similar concerns about Oryx and Crake. I haven't yet read the former, nor she the latter, so that leaves us at a bit of an impasse. Oryx and Crake isn't anti-science polemic, though. "Science is a way of knowing, and a tool. Like all ways of knowing and tools, it can be turned to bad uses...But it is not in itself bad," in the author's own words.

In Oryx and Crake, Atwood presents a ghastly future portrait of humanity having succumbed to the baser aspects of our nature, collectively degrading and destroying ourselves through an unholy alliance of tribalism and greed. Old foes, certainly, but new weapons, new tools twisted to...well, "bad uses" doesn't begin to describe it. And such tools--the awful plausibility of it all is what takes the book from bad dream to waking nightmare. The part about the coffee plantations...if you read the book, you'll know what I'm referring to. That's when it hit me: this really isn't that far off, is it...

As for the writing, Atwood is a master. Concise, clear, yet quite vivid prose, few or no cliches. She displays a particular talent for maintaining an atmosphere, to the point that I once had to put the book down for a week before I could muster up the emotional energy to finish it. I don't mean that negatively--books that can hold this sort of grip on one's emotions are rare enough to be precious.

Some slight flaws, as other reviews have noted, but overall a magnificently tragic glimpse into the future.

View all my reviews.
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(many thanks to GoodReads, which has a great "Add this to your blog!" function)

It's been a long time since a book has touched me so deeply--brought back memories of middle and some high school. College, well, I had a hard enough time doing the required reading in college. Plus, as a Political Science major who never set foot inside the English department, what I did read catered to the mind rather than the soul.

But now I'm out, that's over, and Oryx and Crake marks one of the first halting steps back into reading for fun. Well, reading Serious Literature for fun. When not reading Atwood, I've been buried in Abnett. More specifically the thrilling Gaunt's Ghosts series, set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe (no, I don't buy the bloody models, just the books!). That's another post, though. My point is, while I thoroughly enjoy Abnett's books, they are not, nor are they intended to be, on the same level as Oryx and Crake. "Dessert books," I call them.

Anyway, it's marvelously refreshing to be so jarred emotionally by a book, even if the emotion in question is sadness and despair. Mentally, I feel like I'm stretching out stiff muscles and joints after years of disuse. It really has been far, far too long.

Pic of the day

One of the better photoshops I've seen (click for big).


For those curious, the image on the left is the Carina Nebula (fellow nerds may remember the Eta Carinae system from Star Control II, which if you haven't played you should, download for free here).

Again, click for big. BIGGER. NOW.


(hat tip--ugh, must I use this bloggy lingo?--one of the denizens of the Something Awful forums.

For nuke-proof paint, buy American!

Got into Fallout 3 recently, much to the detriment of my free time. Awesome game, but I won't spoil anything here, except to say that Bethesda Softworks have done a far better job than their previous abortion The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. There's still some modified level scaling, but nothing unrealistic or disruptive, and no more cookie cutter dungeons/caves this time around! And many other awesome things besides, of course, but again, this isn't a review, and I digress...

Of course, I can't play it at work (have to do something about that...), so I have to content myself with wiki'ing anything and everything related to the game--tricky business if you're midway through and don't want spoilers--or related to nuclear warfare or fallout in general. In the midst of my browsing, I stumbled across a little gem called The House in the Middle. I'll just go ahead and quote the whole thing:

The House in the Middle is a 1954 short (12:09) documentary film produced by the Federal Civil Defense Administration and the National Clean Up-Paint Up-Fix Up Bureau, which attempted to show that a clean, freshly painted house is more likely to survive a nuclear attack than its poorly maintained counterpart. It recently was included in the first issue of the DVD magazine, Wholphin.

In 2001 the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.

The film was actually produced by the National Paint, Varnish and Lacquer Association.[1] The likelihood that repainting a house would be effective in protecting it from the extreme heat and blast force of a nuclear explosion is questionable, and the film all but ignores the status of the structure's occupants during the event.

The article also lists a link to a copy of the film. I'm watching it as soon as I get home.