End of the World was Boring
The fall of man was multidimensional. Ancestral primates fell out of the trees, then they fell from plant eating to meat eating then they fell from instinct into reason and thus into technology… Then they fell from a joyous life in the moment to an anxious contemplation of the vanished past and the distant future.
Dystopia is the easiest form of societal criticism for mediocre writing. Take the flaws of a society, dial them up and add societal repercussions, and voila! You’ve created a dystopian world. Unfortunately this is like trying to build an airplane by scaling up a dragonfly 100x, without a nuanced understanding or at least thesis on the underlying causes of current societal ills it’s easy for a dystopia to feel cardboard.
Like it’s spiritual predecessor, Year of the Flood flits back and forth across timelines across the apocalypse. Before the apocalypse, runaway inequality and capitalism create a world of slums and genetic engineering. Eventually the genetic engineering and megalomania create the flood, the eponymous global disaster. For the parts I read, Atwood’s prose os enjoyable:
She found herself stepping into ritual as of into a pair of stone shoes.
Oryx and Crake shined in the deep flaws of its characters and struggled with worldbuilding. Year of the flood doubles down on the worldbuilding, going as far as including it’s own hymnbook along with cringeworthy live recordings. Characters are early on subjected to grimdark trauma, but for the first third of the book almost no plot takes place. If I’m going to read a book this dry, I’d rather read abstract nonfiction. DNF at 1/3 in.
Alternate reads: Canticle for Leibowitz Oryx and Crake