Bioshock: Rapture by John Shirley

Combination video game novelization and dystopian parody of Atlas Shrugged in which a new civilization is built that doesn't turn out quite as awesome as expected.

This book is a prequel to the BioShock video games, which I have not played.  It begins with wealthy capitalist, Andrew Ryan, recruiting people to populate his wonderful, new, underwater, capitalist paradise called Rapture and apparently bridges the descent of Rapture from perfect society to the setting of the horror games.

Warning, some spoilers will follow.

Divergent by Veronica Roth

In which a 16 year old girl makes a decision to determine her future, and deals with her choice.

Emily already wrote a good summary of Divergent, so I won't go into the plot much here.  Divergent is about a girl in a dystopian Chicago confronted with life defining choices, love, conspiracies and adventure.  Divergent is one of the best young adult books I've read because of the exciting story and compelling heroine.  I highly recommend it!

Divergent, by Veronica Roth

Divergent, by Veronica Roth.  HarperCollins, 2011.  487 pp.  978-0-06-202402-2.

... in which Beatrice, living in a dystopian future Chicago, must choose a faction, survive the dangerous and competitive training for initiates, and stop a plot that could destroy her whole society.

Divergent follows the adventures of a 16-year-old girl named Beatrice Prior.  Beatrice lives in a futuristic dystopian Chicago, where all of the population is divided into five factions, distinguished from each other by their central characteristics:  Abnegation (the selfless), Candor (the honest), Amity (the peaceful), Erudite (the intelligent), and Dauntless (the brave).  At the age of 16, each citizen takes an aptitude test and then chooses which faction they would like to join.  Many stay with the faction they were raised in, though some decide to switch.  On the day of her aptitude exam, Beatrice is given inconclusive results, which means she is Divergent... a very dangerous thing.  Despite being raised in Abnegation, Beatrice chooses to switch factions to Dauntless, and changes her name to Tris.  There, she must survive a very dangerous and very competitive month of training, while learning why being Divergent is a dangerous trait.  Along the way, Tris meets a boy (of course) and discovers a dangerous plot that could destroy her whole society.

America Pacifica, by Anna North

America Pacifica, by Anna North.  Little, Brown and Company, 2011.  297 pp.  978-0-316-10512-5.

... in which Darcy, a resident on an island of refugees, searches for her missing mother and fights a dictatorial government.

America Pacifica takes place at some point in the not-so-distant future (my guess would be about 40 years from now).  In the future, North America succumbs to a new ice age, leaving most of the continent completely uninhabitable.  An island colony was established in the Pacific Ocean.  This new settlement was dubbed America Pacifica, and holds about 50,000 residents.  The island is governed by a mysterious dictator whose council keeps a very tight hold on everything.  Darcy, an 18 year old girl, lives on America Pacifica with her mother, Sarah.  Sarah came to the island as a young woman, several years before Darcy's birth, and was one of the earliest residents to settle there.  Darcy and Sarah are extremely close, and have no other relatives or friends.  They live in a dilapidated apartment with leaky ceilings and a communal bathroom, and with both of their wages they barely have enough money to pay rent and to buy cans of cheese food.  One day Sarah receives a strange visitor at their apartment, and the next day, she's gone.  Darcy sets off on a journey to find her missing mother, and along the way she starts to learn truths about the island's history, its government and various secrets being kept by both the government and Darcy's own mother.

The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer

In which a boy grows up to discover his purpose and sinister destiny in a futuristic, ruined North America.


This book review contains spoilers because it's not something I can highly recommend, and I prefer to discuss plot details.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

I read Brave New World back in high school and I remember really liking it. I wanted to read it again to see if I still liked it or if it was as Important as my 17 year old brain had decided.


From the class I mostly remember we had to give little skits introducing the rest of the class to the book. We were going to act out the tour scene from the beginning of the book. A really hot boy was the tour guide and he put on a stupid mustache and talked in a funny accent. That and my nervousness made me unable to stop giggling and do my parts. Pretty typical!

Brave New World is set in a future earth where a religion has been made out of Ford's assembly line insight and productivity, babies are massed produced and people spend their time drugged, enjoying pornographic or trivial hobbies. That's a huge oversimplification. The setting is actually the best part of this book. It centers around workers at one baby producing center. The previously mentioned tour scene introduces the reader to the way babies are grown in jars, poisoned to reduce the intelligence of future members of lower casts, conditioned to be happy, content, materialistic and free-loving.

The Humanoids by Jack Williamson

The Humanoids is set in a universe in which humans have colonized an unknown (and apparently high) number of proximate planets, and have access to interstellar flight. At some point, capable androids (the humanoids) were created to protect and help people. The problem is that they do it too well! The book follows the human resistance to the humanoids. This review contains minor spoilers, but nothing to obviate the book!


I was initially prepared to be disappointed by this book. I immediately noticed that some of the language was dated. I don't tend to like classic science fiction as much as newer stuff, a lot of it seems heavy on the science and light on things that make for good fiction, like character development. This might have been the case here to a limited extent, but I still really enjoyed the book.

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

The third and final installment of the Hunger Games series concludes the story decisively. In my opinion, this was the weakest of the series for a variety of reasons.

While I appreciate the intensity of the characters being driven insane by their adventures, their lack of agency in a lot of what they do and what happens to them is really frustrating. This plays into the fact that this is not and never was a rebellion that belonged to Katniss, she just played a small part in it.

Perhaps I read the first two books wrong. I interpreted the scenes involving beauticians and fashion in the first two to be examples of the celebrity obsessed decadence of the Capitol as a mirror to the subsistence of the districts. In this book, her primary contribution to the war effort isn't in her physical ability to kill without peer... it isn't in her brilliant mind or vicious personality... it's her appearance in front of a camera, and once again things like outfits, presentation, and inspiring emotions through acting matter more than anything else.

New characters keep being introduced, but we keep failing to get to know them as well as we used to. People like Boggs, Messalla, Jackson, Homes, Castor, McGillicutty, and Cressida are all people in it and I couldn't tell you one character trait of any of them. We meet Finnick's friend Annie and I think she gets a single sentence of characterization. Heck, we finally really meet Gale and pretty much all we ever learn about him is that he's an asshole.

Most of the interesting and formidable problems introduced in the Hunger Games with formulating this rebellion were solved outside the character's understanding or control. We're told their actions had relevance, but except for one or two moments in the book seem to actually hinge on their participation. The characters we know don't arm the districts, communicate between them, mobilize them in an organized fashion, plan an overall strategy, or anything like that. Most of their time is spent hallucinating in hospital beds.

The... thing... that Coin may or may not have done (to use Emma's terminology) just doesn't make sense, no matter how you slice it. Neither side had a good motivation for doing it, and had no reason to expect it to even work if they had. It was just necessary for the book to reach the final conclusion and felt really contrived.

Really, the only thing that remains as high quality as ever through all this is Katniss. She remains an interesting character right to the end, despite how crazy she's gotten by now. Every character centric scene about her (that doesn't take place in a broom closet or nightmare/hallucination in a hospital bed) rings completely true.

Endings are hard. I wish this had been better, but it did work. The darkness and violence this one was able to go to let it feel like it was a real war, I just wish our characters were allowed to have participated to a larger extent in what happened in it.

Veracity, by Laura Bynum

Veracity, by Laura Bynum. Gallery Books, 2010. 376 pp. 978-1-4391-2335-5.

... in which we learn the power of truth and words in an oppressive totalitarian regime.

Set in 2045, the not-too-distant future, the story here revolves around a small resistance group attempting to overthrow the totalitarian government that now controls America. After a disease wipes out half of the country's population in 2012, the federal government gradually expands its power over the people to the point where America is no longer recognizable. Every citizen is implanted with a transmitting device, called a slate. The slate transmits every word ever spoken by that citizen to a central facility, where monitors listen in on every conversation and search for forbidden words. Forbidden words are placed on Red Lists by the government, and whenever a person speaks a forbidden word, they receive a sharp shock in their neck from their slate. If they speak one of the extra bad words, the Blue Coats (government police) come for them, and they are never seen again. Using these methods, the government eliminates entire concepts from the public consciousness. Examples of forbidden words: apostasy, discriminate, ego, fossil, heresy, kindred, obstreperous, offline, veracity. Other small changes are hinted at throughout the book... for example, Washington, D.C. is now known as Wernthal. The President is simply referred to as "President", without the definite article. There is no Congress. The government spends much of its time vilifying a semi-mythical object known as the Book of Noah, supposedly the book that guides the resistance.

The majority of the book follows a woman named Harper Adams. Harper occupies an extremely elite position in the new hierarchy. She is a Senior Monitor, the second highest ranked individual in the country, responsible for monitoring the nation's speech. She also has special abilities, allowing her to read the moods and intentions of people. Harper can see people's "colors", which allows her to know if they're lying, in pain, angry, etc. Because the government's control is so complete and their brainwashing so effective, Harper never really questions her way of life. Sometimes she is disturbed by the brutality of the punishments dealt out to the non-compliant, but she never strays until her best friend, the highest ranked Senior Monitor, is caught working for the resistance. Her friend is killed, and her friend's daughter dies a brutal death. The final straw comes when her daughter's name, Veracity, is added to the Red List. Harper eventually goes to work for the resistance, where she is introduced to strange new concepts like culture, democracy, freedom, etc.

I enjoyed reading this book, with a few drawbacks. I was very interested in the central concept of the book, that by eliminating key words from a population's vocabulary, you can also eliminate whole ideas and concepts. Quite an ingenious way of controlling a population! The rhetoric employed by the government was really unsettling, simply because I can see how effective such speeches could be on a population that knows nothing of free choice. I liked many of the key characters in the book, and the most important ones were fairly well fleshed-out, though some of the secondary characters did seem pretty flat. There were a few pretty interesting surprises, including some of the liberties the government had taken with the nation's history. Also, when we finally get around to seeing the Book of Noah, that's a pretty interesting part as well.

The biggest issue with this book was probably in the explanatory story telling. I never really understood how Harper's special abilities worked, or how certain individuals developed them. My first guess was that the abilities were a result of the Pandemic that wiped out half the population, but that turned out to be an incorrect guess, and it was never really explained. I guess at some point in the near future, humanity will spontaneously evolve so that a few individuals can see energy colors and project their consciousness out to buildings hundreds of miles away. Alright, then. My second complaint is that the ending was muddled. I'm still not really sure what happened, because everything happened pretty fast.

In the end, I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoyed books like 1984 or The Handmaid's Tale.

4/5 stars.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Emily wrote up an excellent summary of the plot of Oryx and Crake in her review, here. I am not going to reiterate that, just give my impressions of the book.


It is a very powerful, well written story. The general theme seems to be a dire warning about where genetic modification and all that fun stuff might lead. As Emily mentions in her review, the story takes place in two settings... the time before a mysterious virus kills most of humanity and the period after. There is a single POV character in both periods, reminiscing about various events in his prior life, and sort of wandering around the setting complaining after the virus.

I was much more interested in the parts of the story focused on the time before. Until the last few chapters, I was waiting to find out just what had wiped out humanity, and where the POV character's friends Oryx and Crake were. It gave a lot of hints, but Atwood doesn't tell you exactly what happens until the very end of the book. I found myself significantly less interested in the parts of the story from after the disaster. The main character was just wandering around and complaining, I felt like. It didn't add a whole lot, just made me want to skip ahead to the parts about the world crashing and burning.

This book is described as about a love triangle. That is totally false advertising. There may in fact be a love triangle in the book, but it only exists in the last few chapters of the book and seems fairly contrived. Just to sort of maybe almost explain a certain event. Not really central to the story at all.

My main complaint about Oryx and Crake is that I was only ever emotionally attached to one character (Killer) who was both minor and killed off early. I found Jimmy/Snowman obnoxious, Oryx unlikely and contrived, and Crake just immensely unlikeable in general. Although not to the extent that I thought his ultimate contribution to the situation in the story seemed very plausible.

I am not sure how comfortable I am with Atwood's general anti-bioengineering message. I think there is valid progress that could be brought about through bioengineering! The chicken nobs, for example, seem like a good innovation! As a vegetarian, would I eat chicken that was grown on what were essentially plants that felt no pain and had no brains capable of suffering? Hell yes I would! I think that I would sign on to human organs being grown in pigs if it could save the life of someone I loved. I think a lot of valid progress is to be had through these avenues, and I took issue with the way Atwood treated these ideas as self-evidently bad.


The setting of Oryx and Crake seems to be devoid of both morality and a real government. It seemed like kind of corporate fascism/anarchy where money was power and freedom only existed for those with money. Obviously, in this fictional setting devoid of any ethics or oversight, corporations ran wild with bioengineering. But that seems realistically more of an argument for a strong, independent FDA than against the science of bioengineering.

So in all, this book is interesting and raises important questions, but is not without a significant bias, in my opinion. If you are already against bioengineering or whatever, you will probably appreciate it more than I did. I don't think the story was compelling enough to stand on its own as literature without the social commentary, and the social commentary was a little much for me. Not a bad book, and I enjoyed reading it, but it isn't something I would necessarily recommend to most people. Now I want to read Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale again and see if I am as crazy about it now as I was in high school!

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

 Battle Royale is one of my favorite movies, and comparisons between it and this book are going to be inevitable because they share a number of themes and subject matter. In fact, I'd be surprised if Suzanne Collins has never seen that movie. However, while they share some themes and concepts, the focus of each is very different.

The Hunger Games follows the story of a girl named Katariss entered into a cruel tournament where children are forced to fight each other to the death for the entertainment of the higher class. Battle Royale is the story of a 9th grade class judged the "worst in the nation", put on an island and forced to fight to the death by their government.

The explanation of the purpose and mechanics of the contest in Battle Royale are somewhat brief and utilitarian, putting the characters into the mix as soon as possible, and the story took place almost entirely within the tournament itself. The plot was essentially about how each character reacts to the situation based on who they are, what they value, and what they would sacrifice for what they valued. I'll get into why this is so different from the Hunger Games in just a second.

Almost everything about this book is right. Every single character is fascinating, and the viewpoint character is no exception. I found myself speculating about their lives outside the scope of the book, and I felt like I was making informed guesses because they were so real. I was actually dead-on accurate in my speculations when it came to Haymitch. The main two characters are by far the most realized, even among the bunch and discovering more about them was the thing that pulled me through the story in less than a day.

Every instance of exposition, every reveal is done well. We learn things precisely when we need to know them. The initial conditions of the contest aren't revealed until the main character is living them, even though she would've known about them before. If the reader had known ahead of time about that, it wouldn't have held one quarter the intensity it did.

Every character was likable, even the ones which in any lesser author would have been written as unlikable because it's such an easy crutch to do so. I should specify more clearly what I mean by "character" here, because the overwhelming majority of the contestants actually in the arena actually never became characters at any point. Even the antagonist for most of the story wasn't really a character, just a Dragon. A dangerous object to be avoided or disarmed. Even Foxface, who had identifiable traits and interacted with the plot at a few points is someone I still can't decide was really a character or not. The characters who were characters though were simply amazing, and their sheer personhood made this story work in every possible way.


The reason why the Hunger Games is different than Battle Royale is that the Hunger Games was about Katariss, what elements shaped her as a character and put her on the path to the Games, what she was willing to do to increase her chances of winning the Games, and how she felt about the Games. Battle Royale was a census of how various people faced death, friendship in the face of inevitable death, and senseless, breathtaking unfairness. BR didn't need to explain in very good detail why they were in the situation, because it would've taken away from the 'senseless' aspect. The Hunger Games, however, explored the question of the purpose of the Games, their place in the world and it's history, and their role in shaping who Katariss is. The Games were characterized to such an extent that I don't feel it'd be inaccurate to say that the Games themselves are the book's real antagonist.

The Hunger Games was amazing. Eleventy squintillion stars out of a possible five.

And I was telling Emma I thought I might wear out her "1 Star" tag...

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

This is the third and final book in Suzanne Collin's Hunger Games series. The first was The Hunger Games, and the second was Catching Fire.


This book failed to blow my mind like The Hunger Games did. It was a solid conclusion to the trilogy, and took the reader to new, if largely expected, places. It wrapped up everything that needed wrapped up and was largely satisfying, but was not even close to as awesome as The Hunger Games was. Too bad.

Collins impressed me in this book with the horrible things she did to certain characters that seemed sacred and untouched before. Really bad stuff happens, people change, and characters really develop fully. Peeta especially has a really, really interesting development that sort of defines the book for me. And Buttercup. But I am a sucker for cats. I cried my brains out during one of Buttercup's scenes.

I felt like the Coin plotline was really contrived and/or confusing. You never really got a sense of what she was actually doing. Katniss didn't even seem to know what was going on with Coin ever, even at the end when Katniss acted rather decisively on some really questionable information about Coin. I felt like Collins really should have told us outright whether or not Coin had... done the things... but I was really unsure about that! It would have been nice to know whether the intrigue Katniss was acting on was real or imagined.

I would still recommend the series, but if you read the first book and don't feel like you need to know what happens next more power to you. The first book is orders of magnitude better than the rest of the series.

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

This is the sequel to The Hunger Games, and compared to the first book it was very disappointing. It was still good, but Hunger Games was stellar and good when you are expecting stellar is disappointing.


Too much of Catching Fire was devoted to that old, comfortable teen romance routine, e.g., "oh no, two boys love me and I am sort of in love with both of them, and I don't know what I really want but I refuse to actually talk to anyone about what I am feeling." Really lame. A lot of Catching Fire is, unfortunately, devoted to Katniss bellyaching in her head about her relationships with Gale and Peeta. This was extremely repetitive and boring.

The writing in this book was the same as in Hunger Games: first person, present tense. This is awesome in the more action packed parts of the book, but just weird when Katniss is worrying about hurting people's feelings for endless pages or speculating about what may or may not happen eventually. First person present tense does not lend itself to introspection well, it turns out.

Don't get me wrong, there are good parts of this book. It really picks up about 60% of the way through and is as exciting and engaging as Hunger Games, if not as original. A few of the peripheral characters became more interesting, and there were a ton of unexpected twists and turns. You can't help empathizing with Katniss and her friends in this book. The setting is so cruel and heartless to them that I definitely choked up once or twice.

I am not sure that this book should exist. Hunger Games was amazing, and the third book (Mockingjay) promises to take the reader to very interesting places, but Catching Fire couldn't decide if it was setting up the third book or rehashing the first. Literally, when it wasn't setting up stuff that didn't even begin to happen in this book, remarkably similar things were happening to the first book. It's pretty much like if there was a sequel to "Titanic" where Rose took another cruise where the boat crashed into an iceberg. Oh, and half the movie would be devoted to her discussing her feelings. So maybe the plot of Catching Fire could have been abbreviated and stuck in "Mockingjay." Or not. We'll see.

I hesitate to recommend or disparage this book too much before I read "Mockingjay" since how much I like the third book will determine my feelings on the series as a whole. Stay tuned for that!

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

I was so prepared to be disappointed by this book because of its recent hype and popularity but I was completely not disappointed! This is one of the best books I have read in a while. I got so caught up in the story I read it in about 48 hours. It actually deserves its popularity, unlike some books I could mention.


The Hunger Games is set in a dystopia that used to be North America. Their are several districts which are subjugated by the capital. People in the capital enjoy wealth while those in the districts starve and generally have pretty terrible lives. To flaunt its power over the districts, each year the capital takes a boy and a girl from each district and forces them all to fight to the death in a televised game. The story follows Katniss, one of the best heroines in any book I have ever read. She is the provider for her mother and sister, and actually grounded and mature, unlike most girls portrayed in fiction. The Hunger Games is not about her feelings usually, but when Katniss talks about her feelings and all that she actually sounds like a real person! The book isn't a series of her poor decisions. She is a badass. I don't want to give away any more of the plot, because it is super awesome and everyone should read this book.

The Hunger Games is written in first person, present tense, e.g.: "I roll an unfamiliar berry in my fingers." It was distracting for about three pages, then I stopped noticing and it seemed natural with the fast paced, immediate nature of the story. I am not sure I have ever read a book written in such a way, but it somehow worked really well.

I was a little worried that, despite being a young adult book, The Hunger Games would be disturbing and violent given the setting. It really wasn't! Remarkably, even though the book was about teenagers having to kill each other it was very tasteful and not disturbing. I appreciated the complete absence of any sexual violence.

There are so many aspects of this book that blew me away. I feel like I can't go into all the things I loved about this book without giving a lot away, but just know it totally rocked my world. I can't wait to get a hold of its sequels. I am so glad I waited to read this book until the entire trilogy was published... I would hate to have to wait to finish the series. I am definitely going to pick up the second and third books ASAP. I cannot recommend this book highly enough to anyone who likes adventure stories, dystopian settings, female heroes, young adult books... It's really an amazing book!

Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood

Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood. Anchor Books, 2003. 389 pp. 978-0-385-72167-7.

... in which we read of a devastating biological apocalypse that ravages the world, and explore the events and philosophy leading up to it, as well as the consequences in the aftermath.

Anyone who has ever read anything by Margaret Atwood should know that her work is not exactly what you'd call cheerful, but it is always relevant. Atwood is most famous for The Handmaid's Tale, an Orwellian depiction of a bleak future where human reproduction is an imperative and society is ruled by totalitarian dictatorships. Oryx and Crake is also Orwellian, but in a different way.

The story jumps between two time-lines, both in the future. The first time-line, the "past", depicts events that occur before the biological catastrophe. The second time-line, the "present", depicts what the world is like after the catastrophe. The first time-line is set in a world that has become highly stratified; the wealthy and brilliant live in secure, walled communities known as "Compounds". Each Compound is operated by a major corporation, and all who live within its walls are employees of the corporation or families of employees. The Compounds have everything the rich and intelligent need: clean air, reliable food, first-rate medical care, modern amenities, etc. Surrounding these Compounds are the "pleeblands"... communities full of the not-so-fortunate. The pleeblands aren't exactly hellish places, but they're not exactly nice either. They're grimy, crime-ridden, seedy places. Children within the Compounds are educated to contribute to the upper echelon society, and rarely, a child with promise is brought in from the pleeblands to be educated at a Compound college.

Jimmy, the son of two biologists working for a biotech company, lives a lonely childhood. He isn't brilliant like his parents, and he is constantly aware of his failures. His father puts work first: his work is on "pigoons", pig hybrids that have been genetically engineered to grow organs for human transplants. A single pigoon might grow five human livers, or several kidneys. Companies all around the world have made it their business to select desirable traits from animals and mix them all together into human-designed hybrids, for example, the rakunk, which is a docile pet that's a cross between a skunk and a raccoon. Jimmy's mother is disenfranchised with her work. She soon turns against biotech entirely and flees the Compound. As a teenager, Jimmy meets a brilliant boy named Glenn. The two of them become fast friends, bonding over a game called Extinctathon, where the person with the best knowledge of extinct species wins. Through this game, Glenn earns himself the nickname Crake, after a small extinct bird (it's still alive now, but in Atwood's future, it's long gone, like the vast majority of species). Eventually Jimmy and Crake go off to separate colleges; Crake goes to the Watson and Crick Institute, for the very very brilliant and promising scientific minds. Jimmy, a much less impressive student, gets sent to the Martha Graham Academy, a school that seems to focus on arts and literature. Crake's classmates invent creatures like the ChickieNob, a chicken body that grows only the parts you need... for example, a "chicken" with ten drumsticks on a torso, and nothing else. These students go on to the most prestigious jobs. Jimmy's classmates plagiarize their way through school, and Jimmy graduates with a degree in something like advertising.

In their adult life, Crake goes on to work for the top biotech company, and Jimmy goes along to manage the rhetoric and public image side of the work. Along the way, they meet a girl who goes by the name Oryx (an antelope, presumably extinct by that point). She was born and grew up in southeast Asia as a sex worker, and eventually makes her way to the US. Inevitably, Jimmy, Oryx and Crake find themselves in a love triangle.

The second time-line follows Jimmy, a survivor of the apocalypse, and a breed of "humans" known as the Crakers, engineered by Crake to be "perfect". Slowly, piece by piece, we learn what the apocalypse was, what led to it, the cause, and the aftermath.

This is not at all a cheerful story. Even the first time-line, before the catastrophe, gives me the creeps. The setting after the catastrophe is bleaker. Having said that, I couldn't put it down. Jimmy, the main character, is deeply flawed but also by far and away the most sympathetic character in the novel. His life was never easy, and it got worse as he grew older.

One of Atwood's strengths is the way she weaves her social commentary into her stories. In this instance, it comes across a little strong occasionally, but her points need to be made. When we've bred all of the undesirable traits out of humanity, do we cease to be human? Just because we can splice together genes from totally different biological kingdoms, should we? Are science and "progress" for the sake of science and "progress" laudable goals? What is the role of spirituality, religion, and morality in the destruction of an old society and the shaping of a new society? The novel closes on a note that the reader can take as hopeful or not. This book is the first of a trilogy, called the MaddAddam trilogy. The second book was released in 2009.

In an interesting juxtaposition from the norm for novels such as this, the role of humans-as-gods with no higher power than their own science and hubris are not "the good guys". Futuristic fiction tends to portray the shining civilizations of tomorrow as bastions of science, logic, and rationalism; gleaming pillars of progress. Atwood dares to suggest that maybe science and progress, without being tempered by an understanding of humanity's place in the universe, could ultimately be our downfall.

A highly recommended read for people who enjoyed other Atwood novels; George Orwell's 1984; anyone who enjoys reading about the interplay between science, progress, and society; and anyone who ever ponders what it is to be human, and what that implies about our responsibility to the world as a whole.