The Year of the Flood - Margaret Atwood
I liked Oryx and Crake more.
I wish the apocalypse would have occurred closer to the beginning of the book. We already had a good idea of how the apocalypse came to be, I would have liked to see what happened after the end of humanity as we know it. It was excellent, but I wasn’t as interested in the nature cult as Atwood would have liked me to be.
Expedition To Earth - Arthur C Clarke
This is a collection of short stories originally published in the science fiction pulps magazines that were so popular in the 50s and 60s. Some of my favorite classic science fiction comes originally from these magazines, and most of it takes the form of short stories. I think the length requirements forced a sparseness that fueled the imagination of the readers that is often lacking in today’s epic tomes full of adjectives, run-on sentences and sparkly vampires.
There are eleven short stories in here, and I think my favorite one is called Breaking Strain. It is set on a supply ship destined for Venus. The two crewmen are thirty days away from their rendezvous point, when an asteroid punches a hole in their reserve oxygen supplies. They only have enough oxygen to keep the two of them alive for twenty days. The story turns into a tale of paranoia, as each crew member spends the remainder of the story trying to figure out when the other is going to kill them, ensuring there is enough oxygen to get one of them home. It’s like 2001, but instead of a murderous computer, it’s the crew members you have to worry about smothering you in your sleep.
Arthur C. Clarke is a great writer. Despite how unendingly boring the film is, 2001 is a great book, as is Childhood’s End and a number of his other novels. This book is about 80% great. A couple of these stories just didn’t make an impression on me. One of the things that did make an impression, though was that there was actual science in these science fiction stories. Random technologies were explained. The amount of gravity on moons of Mars was determined and made accurate to the story. Ships were all following parabolic trajectories and had limited fuel supplies. Everyone was terrified that the destruction of the earth would be soon, and it would be caused by atomic war. An interesting contrast to yesterday’s book, Oryx & Crake, in which the world ended due to genetic engineering.
The end of the world in Day of the Triffids was brought on by comets hitting chemical weapons stored on satellites, causing the mass blindness. Then the genetically engineered triffids got loose and started running amok. That’s right, Day of the Triffids is a double threat! Twice the apocalypse, in one amazing bundle. So you should read it instead of Expedition to Earth, because none of the stories feature the apocalypse.
Oryx & Crake - Margaret Atwood
I may have mentioned before how much I love The Day of the Triffids. In fact, I may have to write a second review of the book, so I can talk about how great it is all over again. The first review was a little too… detailed in the plot, and not detailed enough in the gushing about how great it is. Let me reiterate: Day of the Triffids is great. Fantastic. Creepy. Hopeful. I think it’s the best book I’ve read set during the end of civilization as we know it. I never thought that vicious plants would stick in my memory quite like it has. The image of a helpless populate, stumbling through the city streets hasn’t left my brain. The triffids themselves? Horrible caricatures of zombie plants with a description mostly left to the imagination? Great. Lovecraftian. The incompletely described monsters are always the best. It’s not a non-stop horror, and the character moments, and the learning to survive moments are touching and heartwarming. It’s. Just. So. Good. I want to stop writing this and go read it again but I don’t know who has my copy of this book.
…
I’m supposed to be talking about Oryx & Crake. Let me tell you why it reminds me of Day of the Triffids. It’s great. It’s not set during the actual collapse of society, it’s set a few months after, as our protagonist, Snowman, has to survive a new life with the genetically modified super animals. It tells us how society fell into this situation in long and vivid flashbacks. It’s got creepy creatures hiding in the shadows. And mad science!
The future described by Atwood is just horrifying enough to be true, and that’s one of the great things about Oryx & Crake. She does a great job of demonstrating a slippery slope that mad science can lead people down. I’m not actually concerned with genetically modified crops; I think their benefits at this point greatly outnumber the risks. Agriculture has always been a process of genetic modification: cull out the bad, keep the good, figure out how to make it better. However, the pigoon is a creepy almost-reality: a pig bred to grow replacement organs for humans. I’m not a big fan of this. Atwood does a good job with the incompletely described monsters.
I didn’t like Oryx. I couldn’t figure out why she was so monumental in Snowman’s life. It is sort of explained near the end, but to me she didn’t ring true. Crake on the other hand? Loner genius with crazy schemes and the brains to pull off his plans? I know him. She totally got the obsessive genius right. I didn’t really like Snowman that much, but I don’t think we were supposed to.
It has been suggested that at some point in her career, people stopped editing Margaret Atwood and let her ramble on incessantly like a blogger talking about how great Day of the Triffids is. This book does not suffer from this fault. Atwood’s writing is concise, and there isn’t much chaff here; just wheat. It’s didactic in parts — I get it: genetic modification is bad — but it doesn’t go overboard with sermonizing.
My least favourite end of the world as we know it book is The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It’s terrible. The thing that makes it terrible is nothing good ever happens in the entire book. Oryx & Crake is certainly lighter fare than that. It has a sense of humour and happy bits, even during dreadful situations.
So to summarize:
Oryx & Crake: great. Day of the Triffids: even better. The Road: bad.
Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake is awesome. I know this isn’t the review post, but another list, but it’s my blog and I make the rules, and I say that I can talk about how great Oryx and Crake is whenever I want, and I just finished it, so I want to talk about it now.
Crake was a bit a dick, wasn’t he?
Anyways, this list is all about two guys near the end of the alphabet: John Wyndham, author of The Day Of The Triffids which absolutely everyone should read right now, and The Chrysalids, which everyone who was forced to read in high school should read again because it’s actually quite good. The other guy is Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse Five and Timequake and a bunch of other iconic stuff. I have a bunch of unread stuff by these guys on my bookshelves, and want to read something by one of them next. Here are your choices:
The Trouble With Lichen – John Wyndham
The Kraken Wakes – John Wyndham
The Sirens Of Titan – Kurt Vonnegut
As always, vote in the comments. Vote as often as you want. I will give bonus points to the most enthusiastic comment. Bonus points also to anyone who can tell me why they loved The Day of the Triffids. If you didn’t love it, I’ll read about that too.
Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut
I finished this book a week ago and don’t remember anything that was in it except it involved a timequake.
Which isn’t to say it was bad. I read it, and enjoyed reading it. It just didn’t stick.
Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
Player Piano – Kurt Vonnegut