PatHYou have repeated the rules recently and I did follow them - until today. It will not happen again.
Oryx and Crake.
I can't remember why I decided to read Oryx and Crake, well knowing that it is science fiction, territory in which I do not move comfortably and for which I have no compass. Even so it never occurred to me to cast the books aside. Instead, I felt compelled to take in as much as I could of the incongruous, unfathomable events, the demonstrated ruthlessness against the impotent masses by a much smaller group of secretive bosses; the end of civilization, a large city reduced to wilderness.
Is survival possible after massive bio-engineering and mutations of what species are left ? If - as I've heard since - science fiction relies generally more on scenes and events than on characters, what is the reader to make of the three surviving characters (two males and a waifish girl) in this book ? Are they meant to proffer a hint of hope in a new future, as unlikely as that is ? I don't know what message Atwood meant to convey in this book, or IF she meant to. For my part I was not optimistic.
I found Atwood and Margaret Drabble around the same period of time and read the books each wrote with enthusiasm and eagerness, waiting with bated breath for the next one. Both changed in time, so did their books. I could no longer follow Atwood in
The Handmaid's Tale and
Alias Grace. At some point I felt Drabble was being punctilious, and then worried whether something was wrong with
me.
Summa summarum, I do not regret my venture into science fiction. Many things are worth trying - at last once.
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