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Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam Trilogy, Book 1) Kindle Edition

4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 13,127 ratings

NATIONAL BESTSELLER The first volume in the internationally acclaimed MaddAddam trilogy is at once an unforgettable love story and a compelling vision of the futurefrom the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments

Snowman, known as Jimmy before mankind was overwhelmed by a plague, is struggling to survive in a world where he may be the last human, and mourning the loss of his best friend, Crake, and the beautiful and elusive Oryx whom they both loved. In search of answers, Snowman embarks on a journey
with the help of the green-eyed Children of Crakethrough the lush wilderness that was so recently a great city, until powerful corporations took mankind on an uncontrolled genetic engineering ride. Margaret Atwood projects us into a near future that is both all too familiar and beyond our imagining.

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In Oryx and Crake, a science fiction novel that is more Swift than Heinlein, more cautionary tale than "fictional science" (no flying cars here), Margaret Atwood depicts a near-future world that turns from the merely horrible to the horrific, from a fool's paradise to a bio-wasteland. Snowman (a man once known as Jimmy) sleeps in a tree and just might be the only human left on our devastated planet. He is not entirely alone, however, as he considers himself the shepherd of a group of experimental, human-like creatures called the Children of Crake. As he scavenges and tends to his insect bites, Snowman recalls in flashbacks how the world fell apart.

While the story begins with a rather ponderous set-up of what has become a clichéd landscape of the human endgame, littered with smashed computers and abandoned buildings, it takes on life when Snowman recalls his boyhood meeting with his best friend Crake: "Crake had a thing about him even then.... He generated awe ... in his dark laconic clothing." A dangerous genius, Crake is the book's most intriguing character. Crake and Jimmy live with all the other smart, rich people in the Compounds--gated company towns owned by biotech corporations. (Ordinary folks are kept outside the gates in the chaotic "pleeblands.") Meanwhile, beautiful Oryx, raised as a child prostitute in Southeast Asia, finds her way to the West and meets Crake and Jimmy, setting up an inevitable love triangle. Eventually Crake's experiments in bioengineering cause humanity's shockingly quick demise (with uncanny echoes of SARS, ebola, and mad cow disease), leaving Snowman to try to pick up the pieces. There are a few speed bumps along the way, including some clunky dialogue and heavy-handed symbols such as Snowman's broken watch, but once the bleak narrative gets moving, as Snowman sets out in search of the laboratory that seeded the world's destruction, it clips along at a good pace, with a healthy dose of wry humor. --Mark Frutkin, Amazon.ca

From Publishers Weekly

Atwood has visited the future before, in her dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale. In her latest, the future is even bleaker. The triple whammy of runaway social inequality, genetic technology and catastrophic climate change, has finally culminated in some apocalyptic event. As Jimmy, apparently the last human being on earth, makes his way back to the RejoovenEsencecompound for supplies, the reader is transported backwards toward that cataclysmic event, its full dimensions gradually revealed. Jimmy grew up in a world split between corporate compounds (gated communities metastasized into city-states) and pleeblands (unsafe, populous and polluted urban centers). His best friend was "Crake," the name originally his handle in an interactive Net game, Extinctathon. Even Jimmy's mother-who ran off and joined an ecology guerrilla group when Jimmy was an adolescent-respected Crake, already a budding genius. The two friends first encountered Oryx on the Net; she was the eight-year-old star of a pedophilic film on a site called HottTotts. Oryx's story is a counterpoint to Jimmy and Crake's affluent adolescence. She was sold by her Southeast Asian parents, taken to the city and eventually made into a sex "pixie" in some distant country. Jimmy meets Oryx much later-after college, after Crake gets Jimmy a job with ReJoovenEsence. Crake is designing the Crakers-a new, multicolored placid race of human beings, smelling vaguely of citron. He's procured Oryx to be his personal assistant. She teaches the Crakers how to cope in the world and goes out on secret missions. The mystery on which this riveting, disturbing tale hinges is how Crake and Oryx and civilization vanished, and how Jimmy-who also calls himself "the Snowman," after that other rare, hunted specimen, the Abominable Snowman-survived. Chesterton once wrote of the "thousand romances that lie secreted in The Origin of Species." Atwood has extracted one of the most hair-raising of them, and one of the most brilliant.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B000FC1BNI
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Anchor; Reprint edition (March 30, 2004)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 30, 2004
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 3295 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
  • Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0349004064
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 13,127 ratings

About the author

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Margaret Atwood
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Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her novels include Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin and the MaddAddam trilogy. Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid's Tale, went back into the bestseller charts with the election of Donald Trump, when the Handmaids became a symbol of resistance against the disempowerment of women, and with the 2017 release of the award-winning Channel 4 TV series. ‘Her sequel, The Testaments, was published in 2019. It was an instant international bestseller and won the Booker Prize.’

Atwood has won numerous awards including the Booker Prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade and the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. She has also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright and puppeteer. She lives in Toronto, Canada.

Photo credit: Liam Sharp

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
13,127 global ratings

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Customers say

Customers find the book has an interesting concept and writing style. They appreciate the author's creativity and vivid descriptions of the world. However, some find the story boring and difficult to follow at times. There are mixed opinions on the pacing - some find it well-developed and coherent, while others feel it's too slow.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

314 customers mention "Thought provoking"265 positive49 negative

Customers find the book thought-provoking. They describe it as a visionary dystopian trilogy with interesting concepts and worldbuilding that dovetails nicely with Marxist theories. The novel is described as action-packed, entertaining, and humane, with moments of joy and horror. Readers appreciate the author's ability to address issues in fiction that are present in real life.

"...horror of the situation is clearly exposed, there is a sense of inevitability to events, a clear line to its envisioned world from the headlines of..." Read more

"...The worldbuilding was fascinating as it dovetails so nicely with Marxist theories of late-stage capitalism and imperialism but I never developed an..." Read more

"...to students and adherents of alternative thinking and the philosophy of counterfactuals. And of course to any dystopian lit enthusiast!" Read more

"...This book is a literary novel, not a formulaic genre work, so it's useless to berate the author for not adhering to a science-fiction formula...." Read more

162 customers mention "Writing style"140 positive22 negative

Customers find the book's writing style engaging and well-crafted. They praise the author's storytelling ability and appreciate her wide vocabulary. The narrative flows smoothly and is easy to read, with strong plot development and humor mixed in. Readers mention that the book is printed well and bound properly.

"...There are several layers of meaning and symbol buried within its fairly conventional story, layers that built an emotionally powerful edifice in my..." Read more

"...He's not a good man, but he's an exceedingly human one. *Or, more accurately, we see very little of how the poor live in Oryx and Crake...." Read more

"...It's well written, I find the characters interesting, and the book doesn't intellectualize to the points that you become disinterested...." Read more

"...then there is indeed much to look forward to. The author is a great story-teller, and this book (and others of hers) is ample proof of this,..." Read more

90 customers mention "Creativity"83 positive7 negative

Customers enjoy the book's creativity. They find the style magnificent and vividly describe the world the author has created. The book is described as stunning, unique, and art of the highest order. It has an excellent theme and thought-provoking plot. The language and cinematic imagery enhance the story, making it fun and creative.

"...Sad and depressing, with little room for hope, a well depicted portrait of man as he is, unvarnished. ---..." Read more

"...Her style is magnificent. She weaves a beautiful word picture but never in a way that's obtrusive...." Read more

"...The little details are so vivid. I felt as though I understood who Jimmy was and what made him tick...." Read more

"...I liked it especially since I could vividly picture the world she created, which is something I haven't been able to do very well with other novels...." Read more

237 customers mention "Pacing"133 positive104 negative

Customers have different views on the pacing. Some find the society believable and well-developed, while others feel the story lacks interest and character development. The plot is described as linear and unplausible, with an unmotivated last act.

"...The future holds much promise, and will be unlike anything the author envisages: yes, a world populated by thousands of new species of plants and..." Read more

"...Sad and depressing, with little room for hope, a well depicted portrait of man as he is, unvarnished. ---..." Read more

"...All of the topics are very interesting and well-thought out. The reason I'm giving it 4 stars is because it feels like it drags on...." Read more

"...The difficulty with 'Oryx and Crake' characters is their total lack of believability...." Read more

93 customers mention "Character development"64 positive29 negative

Customers have different views on the character development. Some find the characters compelling and well-developed, while others think they remain implausible or a parody of submissive Asian women. The book has some deep themes about controlling one's life.

"...Crake is a very interesting character, a super-genius who keeps his own emotions hidden, sometimes even from himself, as he first conceives of and..." Read more

"...It's well written, I find the characters interesting, and the book doesn't intellectualize to the points that you become disinterested...." Read more

"...I think he's kind of a bad guy in the story, because he is the whole reason for the destruction of the human race!..." Read more

"...It's a character study as much as a work of speculative fiction, and that's really Atwood's strength anyways...." Read more

63 customers mention "Humor"44 positive19 negative

Customers have different views on the humor in the book. Some find it humorous and melancholy at the same time, with good use of similes and metaphors. Others describe it as depressing, cynical, and hard to feel compassion for the characters.

"...I didn't find any glaring errors, and I got a lot of laughs out of the satire, the playing with words that the author obviously enjoyed and is..." Read more

"This is a Margaret Atwood book which means poetic prose, speculative fiction that's fear-based over science-based, and characters that are flawed-..." Read more

"...Sad and depressing, with little room for hope, a well depicted portrait of man as he is, unvarnished. ---..." Read more

"...Ms. Atwood, a witty graceful writer, has always treated the genre with respect ("The Handmaid's Tale" was her "exile in Orwellville")...." Read more

49 customers mention "Boredom"5 positive44 negative

Customers find the book boring and unlikable. They say it's not their favorite Atwood book, but interesting. The main characters are described as flat and vaguely drawn. The prose fails to hold their attention, and the book is a disappointing waste of time.

"...Some parts of this book were boring, but if you are a math and science nerd like me, you will like this book...." Read more

"...but yet it never was. I really hated reading this book. It was a slog. Another book with an interesting concept but it just didn't catch me...." Read more

"...The three main characters in this book aren't particularly likable. Nor are the handful of secondary characters...." Read more

"...Towards the end of the book there are many pages that cannot be read. I am assuming the printer ran out of ink." Read more

36 customers mention "Difficulty to follow"7 positive29 negative

Customers find the story difficult to follow and confusing for the first half of the book. They have a hard time getting into the story, finding the protagonist unlikable and difficult to relate to. The book takes too long to reveal the full picture, making it difficult to get invested in the story.

"...The heir apparents to humanity are a little too odd. It's difficult to decipher whether the animal habits and characterists genetically engineered..." Read more

"...The way the story is told, it's a little confusing to understand for younger people...." Read more

"...characters are well-developed and fascinating though almost uniformly difficult to like...." Read more

"...Surprisingly her prose is lackluster and for the first half of the book tedious...." Read more

Pages of book unreadable due to print errors
1 out of 5 stars
Pages of book unreadable due to print errors
I would like another book sent to me. Towards the end of the book there are many pages that cannot be read. I am assuming the printer ran out of ink.
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Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on November 19, 2003
    Certain scenarios have become standard fare, almost cliches, within the science fiction world. The end of civilization, indeed the death of man himself, due to his constant meddling with the environment, other life forms, and his own germ plasm have been envisaged many times before. This book remains a cut above most earlier attempts, as it adds a very believable human face to the disaster, ties it to both man's dreams and his nightmares, and wraps it inside a potent love triangle.

    From the beginning of this book, where we meet Snowman, possibly the last true human, living in a tree and dependent on the half-human Children of Crake, till the very end of this book, where the full horror of the situation is clearly exposed, there is a sense of inevitability to events, a clear line to its envisioned world from the headlines of today. As Snowman tells his tale via flashbacks to his own past, a picture is developed of technology both fighting and aiding the deleterious effects of prior technologies. From the global warming induced drowning of the coasts and the collapse of world's resources abilities to feed an ever-growing population, to terrorist and greedy corporations designs of new diseases and environmentally harmful crosses of various animal species, each element piles on to background structure. In the foreground we follow Jimmy (Snowman's original name) and his childhood friend Glenn (Crake) as they go through school and find jobs as part of the elite, those whose mental abilities make them employable by the movers and shakers of the world, the genetic research laboratories. During their joint exploration of the internet, they run into Oryx, a child prostitute, who will eventually figure prominently in their lives.

    Crake is a very interesting character, a super-genius who keeps his own emotions hidden, sometimes even from himself, as he first conceives of and then implements the idea of designing a better human. A human who is not subject to wild emotional swings of love, who will not have the need to defend property as he will live on grass and sunshine, who will be carefully isolated from any contact with violence-causing ideas such as 'God' and 'mine'. But Crake is not immune to being human himself, and is in fact dependent on others, primarily Oryx and Jimmy, which is really his flaw. Jimmy is the perennial follower, but when forced to take charge, his actions become the final lynch-pin in the ultimate disaster and his tales the beginning of a new mythology. Oryx is the ultimate woman, fully caring and giving, perhaps too much so, without the ability to turn others to a line of action of her choosing - but perhaps she never wished to. These characters grew on me as I learned more about them, as each had characteristics I could see in myself, different parts of a mirror.

    The power of this book lies in the dynamic between the dream and the practical, between the intent and the result, between the giving and receiving of love. There are several layers of meaning and symbol buried within its fairly conventional story, layers that built an emotionally powerful edifice in my mind, an edifice completed with the last scene of this book. Sad and depressing, with little room for hope, a well depicted portrait of man as he is, unvarnished.

    --- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)
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  • Reviewed in the United States on September 19, 2013
    Since MaddAddam, the concluding book in the trilogy which begins with Oryx and Crake, just came out it seemed like an ideal time to reread the other two books in the trilogy. I am really excited to see what Margaret Atwood does with MaddAddam given that Oryx and Crake and its follow-up, The Year of the Flood are so different in focus. Or, that's how I remember them; I'm just about to crack The Year of the Flood back open, so we'll see if that opinion still stands when I've finished it.

    Back to Oryx and Crake. The plot is relatively straightforward: we follow a man named Jimmy from childhood to adulthood whose childhood friend and later employer, Crake, is a mad scientist. And we follow Jimmy as he tries to navigate a post-apocalyptic world caused by Crake. The book opens some years after this mad scientist has done his thing. Jimmy is both alone and not alone--Crake created an enhanced group of human beings, genetically lab-grown to perfectly fit their surroundings where Crake did his best to splice out `undesirable' elements of the human fabric. Jimmy tends to these people, whom he calls the Crakers, who are human but such a different kind of human that he is still utterly alone.

    The narrative structure is split between chapters set in Jimmy's present, where he tends to the Crakers, and his past, which explores the world which led up to the birth of the Crakers and the destruction of everyone else. But the story is very clearly rooted in Jimmy's present; the chapters set in the past have a deliberate haziness to them, and Jimmy interjects commentary on his memories. Atwood makes it clear that rather than an objective narrative jump to the past what we are reading is present-day Jimmy remembering his own past. Like Winterson's Weight, this book explores the nature of narrative and how we use interpretations of our past to construct our own futures.

    The idea of art and narrative as hard-wired into human beings, as one of the intangible things that makes us human, is a theme in the book. Jimmy is a self-described `word person' in a world where words no longer get you very far. Atwood's future is a destroyed and severely overpopulated Earth where capitalism has run amok. Global warming has ruined the climate, leading to the destruction of many major cities. Class is clearly defined by occupation--the upper classes, uniformly technical and biological geniuses working in elite labs at elite corporations, live in sealed-off and secure corporate communities. There, these scientists are protected from the biological warfare and espionage from competing companies. The middle class live in Modules, and everyone else lives in the pleeblands. Jimmy, the product of two elite scientists, grows up in corporate compounds. The pleeblands are places of myth, of seductive legend, to him and as a reader we see very little of how the poor in Atwood's world live*. So, there's Jimmy, who lacks his parents' capacity for numbers and science stuck in places that do not value his gift for empathy and wordplay. Coupled with his best friend Glenn (who becomes Crake), who is an obvious wunderkind, and Jimmy is left with an inferiority complex the size of Texas.

    I read this book the year it came out, in 2003. I remember being somewhat fascinated by it but not liking it much, which was disappointing as I was and still am a major Atwood fan. I was in Boston, living on the couch of a friend and elbows-deep in a summer of socialist organizing. I'd scored a s***ty summer job on campus which I abandoned on the spur of the moment to couch-surf and read a lot of Trotsky and argue with people about whether we, as socialists, should support and campaign for Ralph Nader. I was driving a lot of conversations about masculinity in activist spaces and how it was alienating female members of our organization. This was the summer I began to embrace my proletariat roots instead of trying to shed them; a moment, if you'll indulge me, of internal class crisis. I picked up Oryx and Crake for some light reading, and frankly I picked it up at the wrong moment in my life. Jimmy, as a narrator, was not someone I could connect to at that moment in my life--his male, upper-class privileged voice and viewpoint was simply a bridge too far. The worldbuilding was fascinating as it dovetails so nicely with Marxist theories of late-stage capitalism and imperialism but I never developed an emotional connection with the book.

    I read it now as someone ten years older. As someone who has, in some very real sense, sold out. I'm middle class now, a thing which I struggle with but is very obviously true. I'm reading it again after doing some heavy-duty renovation on my own psychological landscape which has left me a much more compassionate and less judgmental person. This time around, I connected much more with Jimmy, especially his imposter syndrome. My initial reading of the book as a self-righteous 19 year old was that it lacked depth, that is was a bit obvious. But I'm not sure that's true. It's certainly the case that Atwood as a writer creates stark worlds where Things Have Gone So Very Wrong, but it's also true that within those worlds she's a writer of immense subtlety. I mean to say that the worlds she creates are not subtle, but that the people within them still are. This book, I think, is less a warning about capitalism run rampant or the dangers of playing god with science. I think it's more about the things that Crake tried and failed to breed out of his batch of `perfected' humans: our capacity and need for story, for meaning. I think this is a book about what happens to a culture where we abandon art, where our creative meaning-making of the world around us is seen as less-than and unnecessary. When we do that, Atwood seems to say, we lose our souls. In a sense, then, our compulsion to create and to describe and to enrich is intimately tied with our embedded altruism. All of which is to say that I understand better now why Atwood chose hapless Jimmy, word-oriented and patient Jimmy as her narrator. He's not a good man, but he's an exceedingly human one.

    *Or, more accurately, we see very little of how the poor live in Oryx and Crake. We see a whole lot more of life in the pleeblands in The Year of the Flood.
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Top reviews from other countries

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  • Fitzsimons
    5.0 out of 5 stars Atwood's Best Book. Get the audiobook too
    Reviewed in Canada on November 7, 2024
    This is an amazing book. It's not just for my bookshelf, i've read some of it, but where i've "read" all of it is by audiobook. This is Margaret Atwood's best book.
  • Vicky
    5.0 out of 5 stars Arrive in perfect condition
    Reviewed in India on August 9, 2024
    The book arrived in perfect condition. No damages.
  • NURIA
    5.0 out of 5 stars Magnífico, como toda la obra de Atwood
    Reviewed in Spain on October 23, 2021
    Aparte de que es una escritora genial, es una visionaria. Hay que leerla
  • Laura Buffa
    5.0 out of 5 stars Finalmente una storia di Fanta scienza apocalittica ( ma davvero fantascienza? O molto possibile futuro?) ben scritta e coinvolgente
    Reviewed in Italy on June 9, 2021
    Finalmente una storia di Fanta scienza apocalittica ( ma davvero fantascienza? O molto possibile futuro?) ben scritta e coinvolgente. Leggerò anche il seguito
  • Dolmup
    5.0 out of 5 stars Oh Margaret !
    Reviewed in France on February 9, 2019
    Discovered with the Handmaid ’s Tale , Margaret Atwood fascinates me by her writing and her creativity. What a story. The reader discovers progressively who is who in this apocalyptic world. A world not that different from our close future ?

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