Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood

I've recently discovered a lovely room in the Georgia Tech library completely dedicated to sci-fi. It's such a charming spot to hang out, with little spherical person-cubbies to relax in while taking in the smell of a thousand thinkers' printed pages. Thank you to the wonderful librarians and researchers who maintain this amazing space and collection!

While browsing through the collection, I stumbled upon Oryx and Crake, a book that many of my classmates had read in high school, but I somehow missed. After rectifying this childhood omission, I can say: it's alright! It's not the best book I've read in the past year (that goes to Light From Uncommon Stars, which I'll review soon), but it was engaging and satisfying.

This post-apocalyptic story is told from the perspective of Snowman, a human making do and staying alive near a group of "Crakers," whom we slowly learn are genetically-modified humans. The recently-destroyed society was dominated by severe inequality and astounding feats of bioengineering, as we learn from flashbacks and vignettes of Snowman's life. I'll say that the actual plot did not engage me much; however, it served well as a scaffolding for Atwood's creativity in worldbuilding and near-future technological predictions.

I'll expand just a bit on this last point. We are currently seeing exciting advances in bioengineering to replace or modify how we grow food. For example, yeast and other fungi are being modified to produce all kinds of things, like egg whites, boba, and caviar. In Oryx and Crake, genetic modification is taken far beyond just fungi, to designing animals and humans with "desirable" characteristics, such as pigs that can grow replacement human organs. Atwood also briefly explores the severe social stratification between people who do and don't have access to the benefits of such biotechnology, though I wish the book had spent more time delving into the "wild" society of have-nots.

Besides the creepy-yet-inspiring bioengineering, Oryx and Crake also nails some other very specific predictions. One key example is how the internet is used to hunt people who are considered enemies of the state; maintaining one's own cybersecurity is a recurring theme in the plot. The second example that stuck out to me was how Snowman has ready access to image editing and synthesis technology that can create convincing fake images, just like Stable Diffusion. In one surreal scene, the character specifically discusses how easy it is to use this technology to fool people who are not even aware that it exists or is so useful.

Altogether, I enjoyed the book enough to recommend giving it a quick look. It's worthwhile for the surrealism of seeing predictions of today's cutting edge technologies from twenty years ago.