Amazon.com Review

In Oryx and Crake, a science fiction novel that is more Swift than Heinlein, more cautionary tale than "fictional science" (no flying cars here), Margaret Atwood depicts a near-future world that turns from the merely horrible to the horrific, from a fool's paradise to a bio-wasteland. Snowman (a man once known as Jimmy) sleeps in a tree and just might be the only human left on our devastated planet. He is not entirely alone, however, as he considers himself the shepherd of a group of experimental, human-like creatures called the Children of Crake. As he scavenges and tends to his insect bites, Snowman recalls in flashbacks how the world fell apart.

While the story begins with a rather ponderous set-up of what has become a clichéd landscape of the human endgame, littered with smashed computers and abandoned buildings, it takes on life when Snowman recalls his boyhood meeting with his best friend Crake: "Crake had a thing about him even then.... He generated awe ... in his dark laconic clothing." A dangerous genius, Crake is the book's most intriguing character. Crake and Jimmy live with all the other smart, rich people in the Compounds--gated company towns owned by biotech corporations. (Ordinary folks are kept outside the gates in the chaotic "pleeblands.") Meanwhile, beautiful Oryx, raised as a child prostitute in Southeast Asia, finds her way to the West and meets Crake and Jimmy, setting up an inevitable love triangle. Eventually Crake's experiments in bioengineering cause humanity's shockingly quick demise (with uncanny echoes of SARS, ebola, and mad cow disease), leaving Snowman to try to pick up the pieces. There are a few speed bumps along the way, including some clunky dialogue and heavy-handed symbols such as Snowman's broken watch, but once the bleak narrative gets moving, as Snowman sets out in search of the laboratory that seeded the world's destruction, it clips along at a good pace, with a healthy dose of wry humor. --Mark Frutkin, Amazon.ca

From Publishers Weekly

Atwood has visited the future before, in her dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale. In her latest, the future is even bleaker. The triple whammy of runaway social inequality, genetic technology and catastrophic climate change, has finally culminated in some apocalyptic event. As Jimmy, apparently the last human being on earth, makes his way back to the RejoovenEsencecompound for supplies, the reader is transported backwards toward that cataclysmic event, its full dimensions gradually revealed. Jimmy grew up in a world split between corporate compounds (gated communities metastasized into city-states) and pleeblands (unsafe, populous and polluted urban centers). His best friend was "Crake," the name originally his handle in an interactive Net game, Extinctathon. Even Jimmy's mother-who ran off and joined an ecology guerrilla group when Jimmy was an adolescent-respected Crake, already a budding genius. The two friends first encountered Oryx on the Net; she was the eight-year-old star of a pedophilic film on a site called HottTotts. Oryx's story is a counterpoint to Jimmy and Crake's affluent adolescence. She was sold by her Southeast Asian parents, taken to the city and eventually made into a sex "pixie" in some distant country. Jimmy meets Oryx much later-after college, after Crake gets Jimmy a job with ReJoovenEsence. Crake is designing the Crakers-a new, multicolored placid race of human beings, smelling vaguely of citron. He's procured Oryx to be his personal assistant. She teaches the Crakers how to cope in the world and goes out on secret missions. The mystery on which this riveting, disturbing tale hinges is how Crake and Oryx and civilization vanished, and how Jimmy-who also calls himself "the Snowman," after that other rare, hunted specimen, the Abominable Snowman-survived. Chesterton once wrote of the "thousand romances that lie secreted in The Origin of Species." Atwood has extracted one of the most hair-raising of them, and one of the most brilliant.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Point Of No Return

Out of the ashes of the conflagration that savaged mankind two centuries ago, Deathlands was born -- a tortured testament to a world long gone. Yet, in this kill-or-be-killed world where justice is the way of the past and blood is law, hope is the last refuge of the doomed. For Ryan Cawdor, driven by a warrior's instinct to survive, it's a world that exacts a devil's bargain: the struggle for daily existence in return for a chance to forge a better life.

Vanguard

Emerging from a gateway into a redoubt filled with preDark technology, Ryan and his band hope to unlock some of the secrets of postnuclear America. But the fortified redoubt is under the control of a half-mad former sec man hell-bent on vengeance, who orders Ryan and the others to jump-start his private war against two local barons. Under the harsh and pitiless glare of the rad-blasted desert sun, the companions fight to see another day, whatever it brings . . .

In the Deathlands, the condemned shall inherit the earth . . .

Chains of Destiny

Hard strength and resilience are needed to survive each new day in the treacherous world of postnuclear America. For Ryan Cawdor and his companions, honor, integrity and a willingness to kill are necessary as well, as they struggle to balance a survivalist spirit with a warrior's resolve to press on, living by their own rules in a tortured land, pursuing a dream that leads them into the unknown . . .

Split Decisions

Ryan and his group make their way to a remote island in hopes of finding brief sanctuary. Instead, they are captured by an isolated tribe of descendants of African slaves from pre-Civil War days. When the tribesmen declare Mildred Wyeth "free" from her white masters, it is a twist of fate that ultimately leads the battle-hardened medic to question where her true loyalties lie. Will she side with Ryan, J.B. Dix and those with whom she has forged a bond of trust and friendship . . .or with the people of her own blood? But the loss of Mildred is not the only threat the group faces - in a treacherous world where the ties that bind can cut both ways.

In the Deathlands, the future is not what it used to be . . .

Product Description

Judgment day has come and gone. Now only the strongest survive.

Law of the Lawless
A century after the nuclear conflagrating almost destroyed the world, humanity endures in a lawless land. Those who inhabit Deathlands are either killers or those who would be killed. But an elite few defy the laws of this new nautical selection -- playing both sides of the eternal game of life and death. Ryan Cawdor and his band of warrior survivalists never leave a friend behind. . .or a coldheart alive.

Legend Reborn
Stranded in the salty desert wastes of West Texas, Ryan and his companions find pre-Dark wheels and set out on a treacherous journey across inhospitable terrain. Hopes for a hot meal and a clean bed in a isolated ville die fast when the companions run into a despotic baron manipulating the lifeblood of the desert: water. But it's his fortress stockpiled with enough armaments to wage war in the dunes that interests Ryan, especially when he learns the enemy may be none other than the greatest -- and long dead -- Deathlands legend: the Trader.

In the Deathlands the future is here,
but the past is never far behind.

Product Description

What was once the United States is now the rad-blasted world of Deathlands...a place that more than lives up to its name. Led by a one-eyed warrior called Ryan Cawdor, a straggling band of survivors roams the nuke-ravaged land, homing their survival skills in a wasteland where danger lurks over the next hill.

Emerging into one of the predark installations known as redoubts, the group is taken prisoner in a fully functioning army base operating in a parody of life before the blowout. Its occupants are inbred soldiers, a legacy to the lost secrets of the Totality Concept. Led by the mad general of an obscene military project, the base has found its last hope in the ragtag bunch, a fate that may be even more horrifying than the hell they have survived.

In the Deathlands nothing is certain...especially the future.

Product Description

A planet ravaged by the apocalyptic blast of 2001 gave birth to a new world of savagery and a new breed of hero. In a land where violence rules with absolute authority, Ryan Cawdor and his wayfarer survivalists roam the strange, nascent twenty second century, living by their own creed of honor as they continue their search for a sanctuary they can call home.

In what was once the nuclear testing ground of the predark world, the Marshall Islands are now the kingdom of the grotesque lord Baron Kinnison. Here in this world of slavery and brutality the companions have fought a fierce war for survival, on land and sea yet the crafty baron still conspires to destroy these interlopers. Activating a twentieth century hot air balloon left untouched by the blast, they escape to the neighboring pirate ruled forbidden island, with the Baron and his sec men in hot pursuit and become trapped in a war for total supremacy on this water world.

Not even the Deathlands can deny the human will to survive.

GraphicAudio...A Movie in Your Mind is a unique audio entertainment experience that features a full cast of actors, sound effects and cinematic music.

Publisher's Weekly says "Graphic Audio delivers an action and sound effect loaded audiobook that lives up to its tagline, A movie in your mind."

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Product Description

After an atomic blast hurled the world into an uncertain future, the past still reaches out in hope... and damnation. In a kill or be killed world, one steadfast group of survivors possesses superior fighting skills and sense of fair play that have made them living legends. In their struggle to seek a better way of life, they are unraveling the powerful secrets of the hell on Earth called Deathlands.

A pre-dark legacy of shattering promise lies beneath the ruins of nuke-ravaged Seatlle. Ryan Cawdor and his warrior companions come face-to-face with the ancestors of a secret societ whose members were convinced that paradise awaited at the center of the Earth. This cult is inexorably tied to a conspiracy of twentieth-century scientists devoted to fulfilling a vision o genetic manipulation.In this labyrinthine ville, carved from the subterranean passages of a doomed past, some of the decendants of the illuminated ones are pursuing the dream of their legacy while others are dedicated to its nightmare.

Even in the Deathlands, twisted human beliefs endure...

GraphicAudio...A Movie in Your Mind is a unique audio entertainment experience that features a full cast of actors, sound effects and cinematic music.

Publisher's Weekly says "Graphic Audio delivers an action and sound effect loaded audiobook that lives up to its tagline, A movie in your mind."

Audiofile Magazine says, GraphicAudio sets the gold standard for full-cast dramatizations, and new listeners will become instant fans.

Product Description

Tainted Legacy
America has been forever alter by the ravages of a nuclear attack that sent it spiraling toward a virulent new destiny -- and by the vestiges of the pre-dark world itself, where humanity's internecine battle between good and evil rages on. Though many of twenty-first-century America's darkest legacies have been entombed beneath the ruins of a wounded planet, some remain dangerously alive . . .

Vicious Reprisal
Emerging from a gateway in New England, Ryan Cawdor and his band of wayfaring survivalists ally themselves with a group of women warriors who join their quest to locate the Illuminated Ones, a mysterious pre-dark secret who may possess secret knowledge of Deathlands. Yet their pursuit becomes treacherous, for their quarry has unleashed a deadly plague in the twisted plot to cleanse the earth. As Ryan's group falls victim, time is running out -- for the intrepid survivors . . . and for humanity itself.

In the Deathlands, when tomorrow comes some will wish it hadn't.

Product Description

Survival in America's nuke-blasted frontier is both a curse and a salvation for Ryan Cawdor and his warrior companions. Though the basic needs of existence must be fought for and won with blood each day alive means another chance to seek refuge and a better way of life in a hostile and brutal world, where hope still fires the human heart.

In the relatively untouched area of what was once Niagara Falls, Ryan and his fellow wayfarers find the pastoral farmland under the despotic control of a twisted baron and his slave-breeding farm. Ryan, Mildred and Krysty are captured by the baron's sec men and pawned itnot he cruel frenzy of their leader's grotesque desires. JB, Jak and Doc enlist the aid of outlanders ot organize a counter strike but rescue may come too late for them all.

In the Deathlands, you are sentenced to your destiny from the moment of birth...

GraphicAudio...A Movie in Your Mind is a unique audio entertainment experience that features a full cast of actors, sound effects and cinematic music.

Publisher's Weekly says "Graphic Audio delivers an action and sound effect loaded audiobook that lives up to its tagline, A movie in your mind."

Audiofile Magazine says, GraphicAudio sets the gold standard for full-cast dramatizations, and new listeners will become instant fans.

Product Description

Hard strength and resilience are needed to survive each new day in the treacherous world of postnuclear America. For Ryan Cawdor and his companions, honor, integrity and a willingness to kill are necessary as well, as they struggle to balance a survivalistic spirit with a warrior's resolve to press on, living by thier own rules in a tortured land, pursuing a dream that leads them into the unknown...

Ryan and his group make their way to a remote island in hopes of finding brief sanctuary. Instead, they are captured by an isolated tribe of descendants of African slaves from pre-Civil War days. When the tribesmen declare Mildred Wyeth "free" from her white masters, it is a twist of fate that ultimately leads the battle-hardened medic to question where her true loyalties lie. Will she side with Ryan, J.B. Dix and those with whom she has forged a bond of trust and friendship... or with the people of her own blood. But the loss of Mildred is not the only thread the group faces in a treacherous world where the ties that bind can cut both ways.

In the Deathlands, the future is not what it used to be...

GraphicAudio...A Movie in Your Mind is a unique audio entertainment experience that features a full cast of actors, sound effects and cinematic music.

Publisher's Weekly says "Graphic Audio delivers an action and sound effect loaded audiobook that lives up to its tagline, A movie in your mind."

Audiofile Magazine says, GraphicAudio sets the gold standard for full-cast dramatizations, and new listeners will become instant fans.

Product Description

More than a century past the fiery dawn of post-nuclear America, Ryan Cawdor and his companions journey across a land lost yet reborn, where lawless violence and human perseverance clash, and unsolved mysteries hint at redemption. Though hope lingers under the blood and the dust, looking blindly toward the future is the surest way to get killed. Staying hard and cold for today is the only way to survive.... Traversing the terrain of Utah, Ryan Cawdor and his warrior survivalists find new evidence that the past is alive and dangerous--with a score to settle. Once before they'd battled and destroyed the brilliant and cunning cyborg known as Delphi, but he's reborn and ready to continue his drive for domination. His vast understanding of preDark tech, his cadre of well-armed cutthroats and his legions of worshippers make him monstrous in his quest for power. And he's eager for the keys to the kingdom that only the legendary Deathlands survivors--and their secrets--can help him attain.

Product Description

In the postapocalyptic world of Deathlands, the past and its way of life are as obsolete as myth. Now the days are filled with death, violence and little promise. Still, the human spirit endures, and a group of intrepid warrior survivalists dare to believe that out there, something better is on offer. If they live long enough to find it.

Across the flat plains of the Dakotas, an iron horse shrieks and rumbles across refurbished tracks. Inside the boxcars, Ryan Cawdor and his companions face trouble unlike any other. Jak is missing, Krysty is dying and the train is loaded with sec men, whitecoats and a horrifying experiment--a baron with psionic abilities using stolen children to fuel his mad dream for mind control of every living soul in Deathlands.