Recommended Reading: 'Oryx and Crake' by Margaret Atwood

Atwood long resisted being labeled a science-fiction writer. She eventually gave in to the title, and that's likely because she realized that great science fiction, unlike its pulpy, shallow cousins, is a form on par with any other literary genre. Great science fiction compels us to think not only about where we'll go, but how we'll get there, why we'll go there, and even how those same driving forces got us to where we are today. Great science fiction can inspire us, terrify us, and give us a wider view of ourselves in our current condition. It can serve as a literary portal that allows us to glimpse ourselves in retrospect, like studying an ancient people and picking out their flaws and their virtues through the immaculate lens of hindsight. This experience is, of course, largely virtual and inherently constrained by our current reality and our current understanding. But it can be very cathartic...and incredibly frightening.

In 'Oryx and Crake', Atwood tilts decidedly toward the latter. Hers is a world after humanity, where it appears that the entire world population has been wiped out by a flash pandemic, and where only a lone human named Snowman remains. He looks after a small group of humanoid beings called Crakers, named after Snowman's childhood friend. Just how this state of affairs came to be is fleshed out through Snowman's memories of when he was named Jimmy, back when his closest friends were a brilliant young geneticist named Crake and an elegant, somewhat otherworldly beauty named Oryx. The three of them brought the world to this point, in their own ways (Crake being the most direct cause of the near-extinction), and Snowman's memories of that path create one of the most vivid, mournful, and horrifically plausible tales of apocalypse I've ever read in Fiction.

Oryx and Crake is not a loud, blood-spattered doomsday scenario. Rather, it's a humanistic look at where our technology could lead us, and how the inability of our understanding to keep up with our technological creations could lead to our demise. The future world Atwood creates, the one before the fall, is one where centralized government is more or less gone, and where a strict 'geekocracy' of sorts has taken root. People of higher intelligence have holed themselves up in Research Compounds, safe from the chaos and rampant dangers of the outside world. Here these higher minds plow full steam ahead with genetic research, their efforts geared more toward servicing the corporate machine than aiding human kind in any significant way. Except for Crake. His is a genius of extraordinary ability, a mind so precise and logically inclined that he views humanity like a defective machine, what with its silly hormonal stresses about love and its pointless preoccupation with things like art and beauty. Of course, he sees himself as the only mechanic fit to repair the machine, and this vain belief leads him to what is, for him, the only logical course of action. He builds a better human.

And hits the reset button.

I'll leave the other details out for any potential readers. But this is not a tale of righteous judgement for humanity's crimes or even a panoramic chronicle of the end of man. It's a very intimate apocalypse, narrated by a sensitive soul who saw it firsthand, who bore witness to the evolution of a mind many would call great but of a kind that, in our current world, is becoming increasingly more dangerous as technology and genetics give greater and greater power to individuals. We've seen men like Crake. They've been around for all of recorded history, but their reach was only so great. Now they're getting a pretty big soapbox...and a pretty big hammer.

One of the more intriguing aspects of Atwood's cautionary tale is the notion that it may be the atheist intellectuals with their logical-fueled lack of empathy, not the machinations of the state or the flourishes of religious zeal, who pose the greatest threat to our existence as the tide of 'progress' races forward. In the coming years, we'll be looking to these people to save us, to cure our diseases and improve of overwhelmed lives, and in turn we may give them so much power that the final knife will hit us square in the face.

Anyway, it's a really, really good novel. I'm going to think on it more to decide if I consider it great or not, and that may take a while, but do pick it up and give it a read. It's not often that you'll see issues like this discussed through literature with such grace and somber emotional honesty. This apocalypse feels too close to heart.