"Oryx and Crake", by Margaret Atwood

This book impresses me so much that I am writing about it whilst I am only ¾ of the way through. For anyone who’s watched a bit of Star Trek, or read Iain M Bank’s Science Fiction, you may have been lulled into a false sense of hope and security… that humans will go from strength to strength, that eventually, everyone will have a luxurious standard of living, unlimited by resources, and that we’ll only have clever gadgets and quirks of humanity – or even that of another extra-terrestrials! – to keep us amused.

Margaret Attwood will have you thinking again. This book has more in common with the films “Bladerunner” and “12 Monkeys”. What will happen in the future is still guesswork, but you can tell the author of this novel has spent many hours thinking deeply about humanity and what is going on with technological developments now, and extrapolated these to a frighteningly plausible scenario. I haven’t found any faults in the detail yet – the science isn’t so far out from what it is now that it is unbelievable.

This book has plenty of food for thought… What happens when biological research is allowed to go on unchecked and unhindered by ethics in the profit-driven private sector? When the earth’s resources become limited, how would we react? Will governments or companies play large roles in future societies? What about law and order? Will humans be able to keep up with their own advancements enough to cope with the new boundaries they push? What will teenage boys in the future do to amuse themselves? How many generations does it take to make a species extinct? What are people prepared to ignore in order to have a comfortable life? What balance should we be striving for? Once society becomes fragmented into so many groups, are people capable of pulling together in any way????

This book has many ideas that will stay with you, possibly keep you awake thinking about them. Some “sensitive types” may find this book a bit dismaying at first. Being the type that wants to believe in the goodness of people (within limits!), I was sad that the picture of future society had few if any redeeming features. But then, had the book been written in any other way, it would have had less of an impact. Hopefully I’ll be able to turn this around into an inspiration somehow.

The book is written exceedingly well, and draws you in from the start. At first you are acquainted with an old man on a tropical island, wracked with guilt about something that has happened, possibly surrounded by some indigenous peoples, and using words from their language. Then gradually, by oscillating between the “now” and the “past” in the book, you piece together what has happened. Not a new mode of book writing by any judgement, but the author has artfully used this style to keep you suspended to the end. Despite jumping between past and present, you never feel as if you are left hanging on half the story, as the two are interwoven so well by the narrator. You soon find out that the man is not on a tropical island – he’s in what used to be a city, and civilisation has been ruined somehow.

How? Well it's not nuclear war in this story at least, but go read it and find out. One to add to the compulsory (over 18) reading list.