Like her best-known novel, The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood's new Oryx And Crake begins in a seemingly alien future, then dips back into the past to show how it came into existence. But unlike Handmaid, Oryx And Crake focuses more on the past than on the strange new world that followed; where Handmaid was a dystopian adventure, the new book is more of a speculative elegy for a consumerist, arrogant society Atwood perceives as being not far from our own. Atwood channels her story through Snowman, a man who lives in the wreckage of the civilized world, where ordinary items like hubcaps and bleach bottles are ancient artifacts to the survivors around him–people without facial hair, people who heal their wounded by purring over them, people who are utterly without aggression, resentment, jealousy, or anger. Snowman refers to them as "Crakers," and functions as sort of a cranky elder shaman to their tribe, pretending to possess a wisdom and knowledge he lacks, and hiding his weaknesses from them while eking out a desperate, solitary living in the rubble. Oryx And Crake eventually dives into his memories of growing up in a socially divided world where genetic engineering was the wave of the future, and where scientists and technicians crowded into luxurious but rigidly controlled corporate arcologies to create the next wave of designer foods, drugs, and animals they would market to the suffering lower classes. And, as Snowman remembers, the connections begin slowly falling together. Oryx And Crake is somewhere between a Neal Stephenson future-tech novel and Richard Matheson's I Am Legend: It focuses closely on the day-to-day trivia of life both in a decaying, overcrowded world and in a post-apocalyptic, near-empty one, and it's packed with fascinating ideas. But in its focus on high concepts and ground-level details, it tends to leave out the middle ground.
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