Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood (2003)

IT’S ABOUT the lone human survivor of a deadly virus, exploring his strange new world and reflecting on the key points of his life before the disaster, and the events leading up to it.

POSITIVES: Atwood has been writing science fiction (or as she says, “speculative fiction”) for fourty-two years and Oryx and Crake is an example of the modern master at work.  Anyone who read Atwood’s secondary school staple The Handmaid’s Tale will be familiar with the dark, cautionary style of her works.  In Oryx and Crake, the final years of humanity are represented with unnerving references to modern life; the most disturbing aspects of the digital age, taken to the Nth degree.  The story is also littered with dark, ironical humour and the protagonist is touchingly humane.

NEGATIVES:Having read stacks of dystopian fiction myself, Oryx and Crake sometimes feels like a checklist of the genre’s conventions.