This is a very short abridgment to a review by Richard A. Posner on Oryx and Crake. If this is not yet efficient enough then you may check back to see if I have updated it or any other of my blogs for that matter. I like to come back and re-work my opinions since they change quite frequently.
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Richard begins to make many comparisons of doom-laden futuristic novels. He states that these novels are a community through explorations of a being unchecked. Darwinism and polarization of social classes. An idealism that states simply "ending is better than mending".
"poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels."
Richard continues to compare with great detail George Orwell's 1984 (A friend of mine introduced this book) and H.G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau (A Book I have not read). Animal Farm introduces the idea that pigs are of sinister intelligence. Atwood has adopted many other works into her own.
"And Atwood's protagonist, Jimmy, who after the culminating catastrophe renames himself 'Snowman' (as in 'Abominable'), is a knockoff of Robinson Crusoe: the title of her last chapter, "Footprint," is a clue."
I am gathering an impression of Richard that is not particularly fond of Atwood's writing.
Perhaps he doesn't like cilantro?
Maybe not since Richard attempts to reiterate:
"I do not note these borrowings to scold Atwood (remember Frye's dictum). And I do not subscribe to such criticisms of her book as that Jimmy lacks sufficient intellectual and psychological depth to have moral insight, or that Crake's speciescide is insufficiently motivated. Moral understanding should not be confused with intellect, and the psychological springs of world-class villains are unknown. (That is the lesson of Hitler studies.) Crake is a perfectly credible twenty-first-century intellectual psychopath, with his faintly autistic, ascetic hyper-rationalism and his techie-bureaucratic talk, as in, "Let me walk you through a hypothetical scenario," or, "It was an elegant concept, though it still needed some tweaking." One knows men like Crake."
I am like these two characters combined! Thanks for changing how I looked at this...
It is unfortunate that I hadn't the privilege to develop this character myself.
Richard then goes on finally attempting to spoil the entire novel for me revealing plot summary rather then a review of Atwood's writing in the novel. In order to maintain some real reactions and realize these revelations on my own accord I will do myself a large favor and skip through all of this plot summary.
He believe that Atwood's Oryx and Crake will be placed on a shelf with many other scientific and prophetic, doomsayer novels. Their survival may depend on their literary merit aside from the social insights. These observations are uncomfortable and it is increasingly difficult to cognate a feasible solution to these issues: scientific-technological advancements. - Dramatized in Oryx and Crake.
"We must not forget that it is in the nature of prophecies of doom that all but the last are falsified."
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Words used to describe Margaret Atwood:
Oryx and Crake:
Splendid, ghastly and scientific.
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Comparisons:
H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm, Paul Ehrlich, Our Final Hour and some others I unfortunately missed. Though I will likely come back to this eventually.
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