#56 Sex In The System, edited by Cecilia Tan

(Belatedly) read for review for SF Site. Discussion of the individual stories here.

#57 The Apple by Michel Faber

This is a sort of rarities and B-sides collection to accompany The Crimson Petal And The White. I've often been curious about such a thing and Crimson is the kind of novel which deserves one. I'm not sure if I would recommend this collection if you haven't read they other but it does flesh out Faber's world in interesting ways.

#58 A Matter Of Size by Robert W Birch

Absolutely bloody awful "erotic" thriller. Just terrible.

#59 The Year Of The Flood by Margaret Atwood

Read for review for Strange Horizons.

Oryx And Crake isn't about Oryx or Crake, or even their Children: it's about Jimmy.

When we first meet him Jimmy is known as Snowman and he may well be the last human alive, though he is not alone in the world. The human race has been purged and replaced by the Children of Crake, genetically engineered to thrive in a pre-agricultural state. Just as importantly they have been designed to stay in this state: the slate has been wiped clean and will remain so.

Very much in the manner of Ballard, in this post-catastrophe landscape nothing happens. Slowly. The prose is well written and, of course, somethings do happen (Snowman searches for food, hallucinates, injuries himself, flees hostile wildlife, etc.) but, whilst there is much to admire, it never rises above being a frame. What it frames, the majority and by far the best part of the book, is a recounting of Jimmy's life story. And the reason it succeeds so well is because, as in several of her other books, Atwood shows complete mastery of her central character.

The future that Jimmy is born into is what we might call the standard mild dystopia of unfettered capitalism. Here, libertarianism means that the rich are free to live trapped in secure corporate Compounds and the poor are free to starve. Jimmy is fortunate enough to fall into the former category; the child of two biotechnologists he is raised in the OrganInc Compound where his father works on pigoons, trying to create the perfect host for human organs. It is a privileged life, but not everyone in the family is happy about the situation:

Jimmy's mother said it was all artificial, it was just a theme park and you could never bring the old ways back, but Jimmy's father said why knock it? You could walk around without fear, couldn't you? Go for a bike ride, sit at a sidewalk cafe, buy an ice-cream cone? Jimmy knew his father was right, because he himself had done all these things.

It does not come as much of a surprise then that before too long Jimmy's mother leaves for a more radical existence. By this time they have moved to the larger, richer HealthWyzer Compound and Jimmy is more upset by the fact she has also decided to "liberate" his pet rakunk. He never meets her again but her ghost follows him throughout the novel.

Just before this, Crake appears in the Compound, though like Jimmy he still has a real name at this point. He takes his alias from an online game, one that will later play an integral part in the end of the world. He's Jimmy's age and already showing signs of the mad scientist he will become; his genius resides in a brain riddled with hubris. The pair become friends and do normal teenage stuff; video games and soft drugs.

Jimmy first sees Oryx whilst browsing child pornography on the internet and instantly falls in love. Crake (all seeing, all knowing) notices this. He prints off a screengrab of her for Jimmy and essentially an image is all she remains for the rest of the novel. Whatever the world throws at her - abduction, slavery, rape - it makes no ripple on the surface and we are forced to conclude that this is because there is nothing underneath. Though they do eventually meet she has achieved such Zen-like poise of mind and body that she is utterly isolated from the world, Jimmy and the reader.

The pair of them, Oryx and Crake, exert a poisonous influence on Jimmy, forever robbing him of adulthood. Both Jimmy and the reader have some respite after he leaves school and the HealthWyzer Compound behind. Crake is instantly snapped by the prestigious Watson-Crick Institute whilst Jimmy has to make do with Martha Graham Academy, a run-down arts college. When Jimmy arrives the security is so poor that it "could have been scaled by a one-legged dwarf."

As you might guess this is a marked contrast in style to that on display in Snowman's sections. It is in these college sections with their humorous trawl through campus life that, as if she was there, Atwood really loosens up. This is the strength of her telling of Jimmy's story: his tone is perfectly capture throughout, from child to adolescent to the brink of adulthood. When he enters the big, bad world of work - grinding out an empty living as an adman - so Atwood's style evolves.

Elsewhere, Crake is in much demand, his skills so sought-after that money and resources are simply thrown at him. This means that he can bring Jimmy over to work in his own personal fiefdom where he is free do indulge his own projects. This is unfortunate because an ideologue with unconstrained access to cutting edge biotechnology is far more potent than one armed with, say, a jumbo jet. And so Crake, with Oryx as his handmaiden, ushers in a new age and creates Snowman.

When Oryx And Crake was published, Atwood made several remarks whose intent seemed to be to stress as loudly as possible that "this is not science fiction". Those within the SF community reacted in one of two ways, depending on their pre-existing opinions of Atwood (and what she was taken to embody) either with wounded dismay or smug validation. In fact the totality of Atwood's remarks, as well as her previous comments on science fiction, represent a rather different, more complicated position than that which was initially reported. Regardless of this she was still guilty of loose language in the service of self-promotion. In this context it is interesting to ponder on the novel's epigram from Gulliver's Travels:

I could perhaps like others have astonished you with strange improbable tales; but I rather chose to relate plain matter of fact in the simplest manner and style; because my principal design was to inform you, and to amuse you.

However, Oryx And Crake clearly is a science fiction novel and despite carping from within the genre it is not an old fashioned or obsolete one; it is true, though, that it is not the sort of book a contemporary SF writer would write. There is no sense in which this is cutting-edge but these are not the areas in which the book wishes to operate. Nor is this reinventing the wheel. Instead there is a serious backbone of extrapolation that supports a rather different sort of story.

If there is one serious mis-step in the future Atwood depicts it is in the ugly portmanteau brand names and neologisms that litter the book. They are clearly purposefully crude, but this is at odds with the rest of the book and suggests that a contempt of marketing and big business has damagingly bled into the text. To take an example, the only reason to contract Corporate Security Corp to CorpSeCorp rather than abbreviate it to CSC is to make a pun of 'Corpse Corp'; worse, the unwieldily title of this privatised police force is chosen seemingly expressly to facilitate this pun. This is particularly puzzling because elsewhere Atwood seems more savvy about marketing, noticeably, as we have already said, with regard to her own work. She is careless in similar ways elsewhere: calling a city New New York is very weak and belongs, along with the brand names, in a broader work than Oryx And Crake. Despite this, and whatever her intentions, Atwood has written an extremely impressive character study that makes a compelling SF novel.

This review originally appeared in The Alien Online April 2004.

John Mullan has just finished a four part examination of Margaret Atwood's Oryx And Crake in the Guardian.

Part One: Disorientation
Part Two: Words
Part Three: Atwood's view
Part Four: Readers' responses *

My own review of Oryx And Crake for The Alien Online.

* There seem to be tantalising hints that Atwood plays World Of Warcraft.

My review of Margaret Atwood's Oryx And Crake is now up at The Alien Online. Part of the review touches on Atwood's notorious remarks about science fiction so, as a special treat, I have assembled a collection of links to what she has actually said.

1)

Q: It's hard to pin down a genre for this novel. Is it science fiction?

A: No, it certainly isn't science fiction. Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that. That isn't this book at all. The Handmaid's Tale is speculative fiction in the genre of Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Nineteen Eighty-Four was written not as science fiction but as an extrapolation of life in 1948. So, too, The Handmaid's Tale is a slight twist on the society we have now.

2)

Q: Do you have any entirely trivial pastimes?

A: I watch peculiar science-fiction films.

3)

"When people think 'science-fiction' they usually think Star Trek, or they think Star Wars, or they think War of the Worlds - you know, talking squid - talking cannibalistic squid. And I saw a huge range of sci-fi B-movies in the 50s: the glory days, those low budget ones with names like The Creeping Eye, which was quite good until you actually saw it! You could see the tractor tied underneath as it crept along! So that's what people think of when they think 'science-fiction'. And Oryx and Crake is not that because as I said there's nothing in it that we can't do. The location is Earth. The characters are us." [WARNING: PDF!]

4)

"A lot of science fiction is fantasy. It's people flying around on dragons, other worlds of strange life forms. Some of them are quite well thought through, they know what the strange creatures eat, they know that life could be sustainable. Others are just having fun.

Oryx and Crake is not science fiction. It is fact within fiction. Science fiction is when you have rockets and chemicals. Speculative fiction is when you have all the materials to actually do it. We've taken a path that is already visible to us. In 1984 and Brave New World, you could see all the elements that were farther down that particular path. I don't like science fiction except for the science fiction of the 1930s, the bug-eyed monster genre in full bloom."

5)

Although some reviewers have categorized the book as science fiction, Ms. Atwood considers it speculative fiction, and to clear the air she defined those two forms and also defined fantasy fiction.

Fantasy, she said, is "largely mythic and Celtic in inspiration" and deals with "dragons, magic swords and chalices that glow in the sky." She offered "The Lord of the Rings" and the "Harry Potter" series as examples. Science fiction, she said, deals with "technologies we don't yet have, other universes," as in "Star Trek" and "Star Wars."

In contrast, speculative fiction is "this planet," she said. It doesn't use things we don't already have or are not already developing. `Beam me up, Scotty' is not speculative fiction. We don't yet have the ability to disintegrate people and have them reassembled in some other place."

Then she said about "Oryx and Crake," "Had I written it 20 years ago, I would have called it science fiction, but now it's speculative fiction, believe me." [WARNING: PAID CONTENT!!]

6)

""Science fiction" is the box in which [Le Guin's] work is usually placed, but it's an awkward box: it bulges with discards from elsewhere. Into it have been crammed all those stories that don't fit comfortably into the family room of the socially realistic novel or the more formal parlor of historical fiction, or other compartmentalized genres: westerns, gothics, horrors, gothic romances, and the novels of war, crime, and spies. Its subdivisions include science fiction proper (gizmo-riddled and theory-based space travel, time travel, or cybertravel to other worlds, with aliens frequent); science-fiction fantasy (dragons are common; the gizmos are less plausible, and may include wands); and speculative fiction (human society and its possible future forms, which are either much better than what we have now, or much worse). However, the membranes separating these subdivisions are permeable, and osmotic flow from one to another is the norm."

"Sci-fi is sometimes just an excuse for dressed-up swashbuckling and kinky sex, but it can also provide a kit for examining the paradoxes and torments of what was once fondly referred to as the human condition: What is our true nature, where did we come from, where are we going, what are we doing to ourselves, of what extremes might we capable? Within the frequently messy sandbox of sci-fi fantasy, some of the most accomplished and suggestive
intellectual play of the last century has taken place."

7)

"I myself have written two works of "science fiction" or, if you prefer, "speculative fiction," The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake."

Firstly, what I have been writing is a comparision of two editions of Tennyson's poetry which, whilst not exactly riveting, I've managed to get into the flow of. As for the other:

Jigsaw Men by Gary Greenwood

Fun but unexceptional. I smell sequel so it may come out bundled as a normal paperback at some point in the future. Here's my review. (My tagline is shit, I couldn't come up with anything better).

Oryx And Crake by Margaret Atwood

As you would expect from Atwood this is very well written. I have important quibbles with it and I liked 75% percent (the Jimmy portion) of it a lot more than the rest but even taken as a whole it is recommended. I have lots to write about this book so a long review will follow. I will say that whilst John Clute and Cheryl Morgan have good reviews of it I will be fundamentally disagreeing. They didn't like it but Victoria Strauss did and I think I'll be disagreeing with her too.

Jarhead by Anthony Swofford

Extremely well received Gulf War memoir by an ex-marine. It is perhaps what you would expect from a highly intelligent, well read man who wanted to kill people: heavily masculine, insightful, brutal, self critical. There are obvious parallels with Tim O'Brien's stuff but it is more extreme than that. It's a timely book (queasily so) and a good corrective to any properganda about "our boys". It's one of only three notable books to have emerged from the Gulf War (that I know of) and it's by far the best.