As the first published volume in Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy, Oryx and Crake met with both critical and commercial success when it appeared in 2003. In conjunction with The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam, Oryx and Crake tells the story of a dystopian society spiraling into ruin, and the lonely apocalyptic aftermath. At the time of its publication, Atwood called it "speculative fiction" or "adventure romance," shying away from labling the work as science fiction. (In the intervening decade, Atwood has become a vocal advocate for science fiction—she even published a nonfiction work entitled In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination.)
Biting social commentary, clever wordplay,...
