triskellian (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
triskellian) wrote2003-07-24 06:34 pm
triskellian) wrote2003-07-24 06:34 pm
Oryx and Crake
I'm going to start writing about each book I read, partly because it's good practice, and partly cos I'm fed up of only using this LJ to whine about work ;-)
So here's the first:
I've finished Oryx and Crake. The subject matter is very different from all of Atwood's books I've read previously, and the protagonist - Snowman - is male, which is pretty much unheard of. The narrative structure is a continuation of something she's done in her last few, two parallel strands of story: the present, and the life leading up to the present, as remembered by Snowman. Oryx and Crake are, respectively, Snowman's lover and his best friend, both dead by the time of the book's 'present'. They are the only people who seem to have had any solidity in his life.
It's the first time I remember noticing her particular style of writing (in the 'I'd recognise it if her name wasn't on the cover' way). Or maybe I notice that in every book, and have just forgotten it by the time I read the next. I had a half-intention to try to define what it is that makes her writing distinctive, but always forgot to follow through on it when I was actually reading. This, I suppose, is a good sign for the story.
So, what did I think? I enjoyed it. It took me a while to get into, although part of that is probably that it's such a different book from everything else she's written.
It's both a utopia and a dystopia. The world Snowman has lived in, told through his flashbacks, is ours gone horribly wrong. It's full of scary images of genetic modifications - the snat, the rakunk, the wolvog and the pigoon (which I keep reading as 'pigeon', but never mind), deep divides between the privileged and the poor, liberty curtailed and conformity enforced. The terrible fate of the rest of humanity has been hinted at throughout the book, but at the end we see it play out through Snowman's memory, as he returns to the scene of the destruction of humanity. We see the global epidemic break out, the chaos as people panic, and Snowman shutting himself in to wait out the carnage.
The utopia - the novel's present - features Snowman as an observer, a leftover from an unimaginable past. The Children of Crake, a completely new type of human, have been designed to survive in the post-apocalypse world that Crake has left for them, and designed without the destructive urges of homo sapiens.
This is science fiction, by almost any criteria you care to name, but it won't be categorised as such. I was discussing book categorisation with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
secretrebel the other day, and Margaret Atwood is a point of difficulty. The Handmaid's Tale is science fiction, The Blind Assassin contains science fiction, and now Oryx and Crake is science fiction, too, but no one would call Atwood a science fiction author, or even, I expect, say that she 'also writes science fiction', as they would of Iain (M) Banks. She's categorised as writing 'contemporary fiction' or 'literature' or somesuch label, and the two don't seem to be able to cross over for her. I'm trying to think of another author who writes both mainstream and genre fiction, without using a different name, to compare how they're treated, but I'm drawing a blank so far.
The book I'm now reading is Trumpet by Jackie Kay, which I'll write about more when I've finished. It's one of the books I'll be studying next term, the one I'm most looking forward to, which is why I'm reading it first. It tells of the aftermath of the death of a great jazz musician who is revealed in death to be a woman, a fact which comes as a surprise to everyone except his/her (trouble with pronouns again ;-) wife. I'm finding proof-reading errors in it, which annoys me. 'Here' for 'hear', plurals with apostrophes. Grr.
So here's the first:
I've finished Oryx and Crake. The subject matter is very different from all of Atwood's books I've read previously, and the protagonist - Snowman - is male, which is pretty much unheard of. The narrative structure is a continuation of something she's done in her last few, two parallel strands of story: the present, and the life leading up to the present, as remembered by Snowman. Oryx and Crake are, respectively, Snowman's lover and his best friend, both dead by the time of the book's 'present'. They are the only people who seem to have had any solidity in his life.
It's the first time I remember noticing her particular style of writing (in the 'I'd recognise it if her name wasn't on the cover' way). Or maybe I notice that in every book, and have just forgotten it by the time I read the next. I had a half-intention to try to define what it is that makes her writing distinctive, but always forgot to follow through on it when I was actually reading. This, I suppose, is a good sign for the story.
So, what did I think? I enjoyed it. It took me a while to get into, although part of that is probably that it's such a different book from everything else she's written.
It's both a utopia and a dystopia. The world Snowman has lived in, told through his flashbacks, is ours gone horribly wrong. It's full of scary images of genetic modifications - the snat, the rakunk, the wolvog and the pigoon (which I keep reading as 'pigeon', but never mind), deep divides between the privileged and the poor, liberty curtailed and conformity enforced. The terrible fate of the rest of humanity has been hinted at throughout the book, but at the end we see it play out through Snowman's memory, as he returns to the scene of the destruction of humanity. We see the global epidemic break out, the chaos as people panic, and Snowman shutting himself in to wait out the carnage.
The utopia - the novel's present - features Snowman as an observer, a leftover from an unimaginable past. The Children of Crake, a completely new type of human, have been designed to survive in the post-apocalypse world that Crake has left for them, and designed without the destructive urges of homo sapiens.
This is science fiction, by almost any criteria you care to name, but it won't be categorised as such. I was discussing book categorisation with
secretrebel the other day, and Margaret Atwood is a point of difficulty. The Handmaid's Tale is science fiction, The Blind Assassin contains science fiction, and now Oryx and Crake is science fiction, too, but no one would call Atwood a science fiction author, or even, I expect, say that she 'also writes science fiction', as they would of Iain (M) Banks. She's categorised as writing 'contemporary fiction' or 'literature' or somesuch label, and the two don't seem to be able to cross over for her. I'm trying to think of another author who writes both mainstream and genre fiction, without using a different name, to compare how they're treated, but I'm drawing a blank so far.The book I'm now reading is Trumpet by Jackie Kay, which I'll write about more when I've finished. It's one of the books I'll be studying next term, the one I'm most looking forward to, which is why I'm reading it first. It tells of the aftermath of the death of a great jazz musician who is revealed in death to be a woman, a fact which comes as a surprise to everyone except his/her (trouble with pronouns again ;-) wife. I'm finding proof-reading errors in it, which annoys me. 'Here' for 'hear', plurals with apostrophes. Grr.
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I look at it this way: One day SF will be pretty much dead as a genre, not because nobody will write it, but because every writer will write it !
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not because nobody will write it, but because every writer will write it !
I hope not.
Science fiction written by someone who doesn't have anything specifically to say that needs to be said in science fiction is fantasy with big spaceships.
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Fantasy could try claiming it opens peoples minds to the existence of unicorns I suppose ;-)
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Fantasy at its best, like science fiction at its best, provides a setting free of whichever contemporary assumptions and values which the author wishes to free it from, in order to consider the main gist of the work in isolation from those issues. And both at their worst are a third-rate adventure yarn with a colourful backdrop.
As you say, science fiction has more emphasis on extrapolation than does fantasy. I'd have thought this would give it more weight with "serious" types who want their fiction to be worthy, but in practice there doesn't seem to be a great deal in it. The only exception to this is distopian fiction, where the contemporary relevance can be made so obvious as to quite take the breath away.
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Not having read either Atwood's or Langford's comments, I can't answer your second question.
As for your first question, I wasn't meaning to comment on any kind of generally recognised pecking order, or to make a value judgement between fantasy in general and science fiction in general.
What I am saying is that in order to make science fiction worthwhile in itself, in preference to fantasy or contemporary fiction or a detective novel, you have to have some commitment to the aspects of the genre which can make it more powerful as a tool than some other genre. If every author was writing science fiction, then inevitably many of them would be doing so because they figured they might as well have a go at it, and the results would, on the whole, be fantasy with big spaceships. Or detective fiction with big spaceships. Or people with issues about their childhood and big spaceships. Or whatever.
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Science fiction is no more about spaceships than about robots.
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But it's no less about big spaceships than it is about robots.
And whether it's big spaceships or robots or nanotechnology or genetic modification or the information age or post-apocalypse society is completely irrelevent in the case where the author knows bog all about science or technology or futurism, and is using SF (or any other recognisable genre) because it's just another tool in the writer's kit to provide a certain style of window-dressing.
My claim is that the only way "every author" can write science fiction is if many or most of them are writing pointless science fiction.
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Similarly, many of her readers probably don't like the idea of reading SF
It's hardly surprising, when SF (and fantasy, and detective fiction, and romance, for that matter) has a history of producing tens of thousands of novels of going-through-the-motions crap. Which isn't to say that genre-less fiction doesn't suffer from the same problem, just that as soon as you've named it, you can identify which motions it is going through and make a conscious decision to avoid it.
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Susan Hill. "The Woman in Black" is definitely a ghost story, whilst "A Change for the Better" (possibly the most depressing book I ever read) is straight fiction.
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