Oryx and Crake

by Margaret Atwood

The thrid book in Atwood's trilogy is being published soon so I thought I would reread the first two books.  This is the first book.

Review from Publishers Weekly,
"Atwood has visited the future before, in her dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale. In her latest, the future is even bleaker. The triple whammy of runaway social inequality, genetic technology and catastrophic climate change, has finally culminated in some apocalyptic event. As Jimmy, apparently the last human being on earth, makes his way back to the RejoovenEsencecompound for supplies, the reader is transported backwards toward that cataclysmic event, its full dimensions gradually revealed. Jimmy grew up in a world split between corporate compounds (gated communities metastasized into city-states) and pleeblands (unsafe, populous and polluted urban centers). His best friend was "Crake," the name originally his handle in an interactive Net game, Extinctathon. Even Jimmy's mother-who ran off and joined an ecology guerrilla group when Jimmy was an adolescent-respected Crake, already a budding genius. The two friends first encountered Oryx on the Net; she was the eight-year-old star of a pedophilic film on a site called HottTotts. Oryx's story is a counterpoint to Jimmy and Crake's affluent adolescence. She was sold by her Southeast Asian parents, taken to the city and eventually made into a sex "pixie" in some distant country. Jimmy meets Oryx much later-after college, after Crake gets Jimmy a job with ReJoovenEsence. Crake is designing the Crakers-a new, multicolored placid race of human beings, smelling vaguely of citron. He's procured Oryx to be his personal assistant. She teaches the Crakers how to cope in the world and goes out on secret missions. The mystery on which this riveting, disturbing tale hinges is how Crake and Oryx and civilization vanished, and how Jimmy-who also calls himself "the Snowman," after that other rare, hunted specimen, the Abominable Snowman-survived. Chesterton once wrote of the "thousand romances that lie secreted in The Origin of Species." Atwood has extracted one of the most hair-raising of them, and one of the most brilliant."

I found this book a rather hard slog this time, I don't remember what my impressions were the first time.  I knew things ended badly so maybe it was the impending doom that made it so hard to read.  At the end of the book Snowman, who seems to have an affection for the Crakes, is very ill.  He stumbles upon three humans is thinking about killing them.... what will he do?

The story, beside its obvious warnings about overconsumption, pollution and genetic modification gone wild, also raises questions about whether it is possible to engineer out greed, anger, lust and other negative bad emotions and what would result.  The Crakes are healthy and apparently happy but can they adjust to change it need be, can they defend themselves if they have to?  They seem to simple to be able to survive any physical threats.  Crake is their creator and they seem to "worship" him as a result as his initial instructions/training to them came via him.  Do human creatures need a creator for guidance? consolation?  Why did Crake unleash the plague on the human population?  Did he intend for the only survivors to be the Crakes? Did he plan to live to lead them/care for them?  He was going to businesses for funds to find the answer for immortality.  I am sure the business people who gave him money were assuming it would bring their own immortality, not the creation of a new race and the eradication of the human race.