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** spoiler alert ** This is the second dystopia Atwood has written, and I think it's less successful than The Handmaid's Tale. Her vision here is of a not-too-distant future in which the US is divided into corporate-owned gated communities where the (biotech) companies' owners and highly-paid skilled workforce live and the lawless, sprawling urban wasteland where everyone else lives.

Unlike virtually every other Atwood book I know of, the two main characters are male. The narrator, Jimmy, and his childhood friend Crake grow up inside one of the gated communities, bonding over Internet pornography and shared cynicism. As Crake grows up, it becomes evident that he is a genius, so he gets accepted to an elite science-and-technology school and drafted into a biotech firm while he's still a student. While he works there, he cooks up an apocalyptic plot to release a superbug disguised as a libido-enhancing pill once he's perfected his own synthetic race of humanoids, which he designed as an answer to everything he's identified as "wrong" with human nature. For example, the "Crakers" have photosynthetic pigment in their skins, which means they do not have to kill to eat. Crake also designed them to be cheerfully promiscuous and have obvious signals of sexual receptivity, thus eliminating conflict over sex. Crake's a real humanitarian, except for the whole "kill off Mankind 1.0" part of his plan.

Structurally, the novel suffers from being too long and taking too long for the story to move forward. Indeed, the whole thing is told in flashbacks, with Jimmy reminiscing as the Crakers pester him for stories of their creator. Atwood erred on the side of too much description in Handmaid's Tale as well, but that was a shorter novel (maybe 100 less pages than Oryx and Crake) and the society she was revealing to us was better realized.

Also, a lot of touches that were clearly meant to be satirical fall flat. One of Crake and Jimmy's favorite pastimes in youth is playing computer games, and the games Atwood comes up with are transparent attempts to shock us with the nihilism of her young antiheroes. Also, every other object in the novel is given some cutesy brand name. This is clearly an attempt to mock the corporatization of global culture, but the effect is just irritating.

None of the characters particularly register, either. Two of Atwood's trademark Elusive Women figure in this novel --- Jimmy's mother runs off while Jimmy is a preteen, for reasons we never learn, and when Jimmy meets up with Crake again when they are adults, and Crake is designing his new species, Crake has a mistress named Oryx, who never allows either man to get to know her, though she sleeps with both. The difference between these and other Elusive Women (say, Grace Marks in Alias Grace, Zenia in The Robber Bride, Joan in Lady Oracle or Marian in The Edible Woman) is that the others either revealed themselves to the reader if not to the men in their lives, or (like Zenia and Grace) gave us enough interesting possibilities that we cared to speculate as to their true natures. These women elude not only Jimmy and Crake, but also the reader.

The men, though given (many) more pages of character development, are nearly as flat. Crake is a clear instance of metaphor abuse: he is indicated to be "mildly autistic," as the college he attends is nicknamed Asperger's U. and he disparages his old high school as containing "wall-to-wall neurotypicals." As his autism never appears in his behavior or becomes relevant to the story (indeed, it is never mentioned except in the chapter titled "Asperger's U."), I suspect it was only brought up to underscore the single salient point of his character, which is his detachment from the rest of the human species. The sole salient point of Jimmy's character seems to be that he is not Crake.