Recommendations from our site
“It’s a really strange novel…it’s on my list because I’ve never seen anything like it. The words in the title, they’re animals, but they actually refer to people. One of them, Crake, is a scientist, a genetic engineer; and essentially, he’s a sort of evil villain character. He’s really, really interesting. He engineers a great pandemic, which wipes out most of the world. And he is in a relationship with this very ethereal woman, who we never really get to know very well, who is known as Oryx. It’s a difficult book to summarise, because it’s very hallucinatory and weird! Every aspect of it is brighter than life, somehow. The basic plot follows a man who in the narrative present is called the Snowman, and he lives in a post-apocalyptic world. He’s surrounded by these very innocent humans who seem a lot like the Eloi in The Time Machine by HG Wells” Read more...
The Best Sci-Fi Romance Novels
Natasha Pulley, Novelist
“Oryx and Crake is here because it’s about the logical conclusion of a whole set of processes that we could have called progress. If you want a wonderful dystopian vision of what happens if you take these forward without any recourse to ethical considerations – without asking what progress represents – then Oryx and Crake does that. This novel was recommended by Karen Buck MP and it has influenced me as a wonderful account of a world run by large biotech corporations, where society is deeply dysfunctional and on the verge of self-destruction because nobody has stopped to say, ‘Is this the right thing to do? Is this the human thing to do? What does it mean to be human and are we still human beings?’ The book is a scream of, ‘When do we ask the big questions about any of this?’” Read more...
Matthew Taylor, Political Commentator
The first book in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy is “a really strange novel,” admitted the novelist Natasha Pulley when she recommended the best sci-fi romance novels: “I’ve never read anything like it.” The eponymous Crake is a scientist who has genetically engineered a virus which has wiped out most of the world; now, a man called The Snowman must navigate the dark days that follow. “It’s very hallucinatory and weird,” warns Pulley. In many ways, Oryx and Crake is a darker and more unpleasant book than Atwood’s phenomenally successful The Handmaid’s Tale, in which the environmental disaster and social upheaval underpinning the plot largely take place offstage. Nevertheless, it’s a compelling vision of a tumultuous future and a love story—of a kind. If you were intrigued by the doomsday cult that arises in Station Eleven, then we think you’ll like this book too, in which a young man plays prophet to exploit the naive.
From our article Books like Station Eleven
