ORYX AND CRAKE

ORYX AND CRAKE – I started reading this some time around the last week of April or 1st of May, after I finished reading “The Phantom” and went back to reading “The Nuremberg Interviews,” and I read the two books concurrently.  Then I finished reading Oryx and Crake last night, but am still working on “Nuremberg.”

Margaret Atwood depicts a near-future world that turns from the merely horrible to the horrific, from a fool’s paradise to a bio-wasteland. Snowman (a man once known as Jimmy) sleeps in a tree and just might be the only human left on our devastated planet… after …powerful corporations took mankind on an uncontrolled genetic engineering ride.” –from amazon.com

And I can’t say much more without giving it all away, but like many such “prophetic” books as this, it brings some alarm, such as:  Can we imagine biotech/pharmaceutical firms becoming so big and powerful?  The fear is easily there.  Or how about what our scientists are already able to do in the area of bioengineering and what repercussions this might bring?  Books like this can sometimes be terrifying.  How easily might a theoretical, fictional future become our Real Future.  Scary – but worth considering in my opinion.  Hindsight is often too late. 

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