Oryx and Crake

I let Oryx and Crake languish on the shelf for a very long time before I read it (even though Margaret Atwood wrote it). Why? Because I dislike the SF genre, especially fin du monde stories. I'm glad I finally broke down and cracked its hefty spine. Snowman is the main character, a survivor of some cataclysmic disaster. Also surviving, and doing much better at it than Snowman, are the Crakers, a strange humanoid species. What happened to the rest of Earth's population? The story unravels gradually, working back to Snowman's youth in a world that has been deeply and negatively impacted by man's greed and environmental disinterest. Society is divided into "compounders" and "pleebs". Snowman (Jimmy then) was a compounder, protected from the pleebs by high walls and security guards called CorpSeCorps. Disease and mayhem run rampant in the pleeblands. Within the compounds scientists work on dubious genetic manipulation projects. All told, things were pretty bad even before disaster struck.

We are curious about Oryx and Crake before they enter the story. Who are they? Where are they? What have they to do with the catastrophe (whatever it is) that has occurred?

The ending leaves us hanging but, whatever happens, we know Snowman is up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

Move over, Al Gore, this Atwood story is every bit as scary as An Inconvenient Truth. It is a terrifically engaging cautionary tale. Atwood makes us believe the unbelievable. I couldn't put it down.