Oryx and Crake

By Margret Attwood

The last time I started recording and writing about my reading I did notice the way I was deciding what book to read to try and make it look like my tastes were not so very plebean. So it is again, look, nominated for the Booker! By the author of 'The Handmaid's Tale'.
Post apocalyptic science fiction again.
From what I remember this was the one that caused Attwood to start making ridiculous assertions about how a book shouldn't be considered SF if it was, oh I don't know, about a ruined world over-run by genetically engineered hybrid animals, since SF necessarily implied ray guns and super intelligent space squid.
It's a daft thing to say, and Attwood's hardly the only one to say it. Jenette Winterson popped up a couple of years back vehemently denying that a book about the colonisation of an alien world might be SF, (others?)
Crap literary fiction is about middle aged university lecturers feeling bad about fucking their students. Crap science fiction is about spaceships firing 19,728 missiles, 1,012 of which are distracted by the enemy's active fire control systems and so on.
Good fiction, be it literary or science (if we accept the premise that there is no such thing as literary science fiction) is about ideas, and how they impact people and ultimately what it means to be human.

That lost was all written a couple of weeks ago when I was a quarter of the way into the book. It's now finished.

It's a very good book, and one I would recomend to pretty much anyone. The only Attwood I'd read before was The Handmaid's Tale - this has the same deft turn of phrase but with a less oppressive atmosphere. I shall have to look out more, The Year of the Flood is a sort of sequel. Not right now though.
Attwood's claim that O&C is not really science fiction hinges on the fact that there is nothing in the book that hasn't been invented yet. This is bollocks. And it was even more bollocks when it was written, in 2003. Genetic Engineering does exist, but without the abilities of these engineers. If anyone's hoping to hybridise snakes and rats, they're still a long way off.
The strange thing is the degree to which, while the themes of the book are, ashamedly, SF, the structure is pure stereotypical lit-fic. An elderly man, living in a world he doesn't fully understand, thinks back over his life, the mistakes he has made, the failed relationships, the best friend who destroyed the world. Fortunately he wasn't an academic, and so was never had any students to regret fucking. Apart from that though, it's textbook.
But like I said. It's good. Worth reading. I suppose it does ask some questions about humanity, but they have pretty obvious answers. As lit-fic goes it's a pretty light read, well worth it.