Oryx & Crake / Year of the Flood - Margaret Atwood

I finished Oryx & Crake in record time sometime last year. It is a truly frightening tale, not in the sense of good versus evil or a horror story. Rather, it is a very realistic look at the direction the human race has taken and the road we seem to be speeding down. I am not up on my science, though I do know we have made some medical advances in many different areas. One thing I do know is that people in general are wearing down their resistance to antibiotics and it has been speculated that we're due for an outbreak of some type. Hence my lack of antibacterial soap at home and hesitance to leap to antibiotics right away for anything.

Oryx & Crake is exactly that--between Corporations that produce medicines and others that produce food in a manner that is even more horrifying than our current methods of hormones and antibiotics that make chickens four times as big as they were twenty years ago... It is not much of a leap to go from how the world is now to the world that Atwood builds in Oryx & Crake.

It took a second try to wade through Year of the Flood, mostly because not only alternates characters, but also includes sermons from Adam One. We see events leading up to and after the disaster in Oryx & Crake from the points of view of two different women loosely connected to Jimmy and Glenn (or Snowman and Crake, if you like). Admittedly, I often skimmed through the Adam One sermons. Towards the end, they actually included information regarding the state of the world and should probably not be skimmed over, but that's just me.

As with The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood builds a dystopia that is believable and feasible based on the reality of our society. If I am honest, her writing scares and thrills me all at once. I'm currently not quite halfway through Maddaddam, and my thoughts are ambivalent at this point. Oryx & Crake is worth picking up all on its own, but I can never leave a series unread. Regardless of whether you want to experience the entire series, it is an apt look at what we are doing to the world. It could very well be our future, as we look at the destruction of ecosystems and the crazy flooding I'm currently experiencing.

I love the characters, they are all so relatable, especially Toby and Ren. They stand out in a set of novels where they live in a society that places extreme value on scientific and mathematical skills with no regard for anything else, except profit. Perhaps this is why Atwood's fictional world goes to hell in a hand basket. Both Toby and Ren belong to God's Gardeners, an eco-group within the novel. Even it has a dark side, as part of the group branches off and helps cause the literal end of the world. Right now, we're ruled by oil and those backed by big oil. We have other options that will likely not be used in my lifetime. Yet, it begs the question: what exactly are we doing? Our lifestyles are not sustainable. I can even attest that I have no desire to give up my twenty minute morning showers or evening soaks. I drive a gas guzzling sports car. I vote sporadically at best. I recycle only sometimes. This is how we reach the end of the world, isn't it?