ORYX Y CRAKE (AFLUENTES) (Spanish Edition)

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 clich?d 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. Margaret Atwood nos proyecta a un mundo nuevo menos que valiente, un espacio extravagante pero totalmente creíble poblado por un elenco de personajes memorables.El narrador es muñeco de nieve. Cuando comienza la historia, está durmiendo en un árbol, vistiendo una sábana vieja y sucia, lamentando la pérdida de su amado Oryx y su mejor amigo Crake, y muriendo de hambre lentamente. Anteriormente, su vida era comparativamente privilegiada, viviendo con todas las demás personas ricas e inteligentes en las ciudades privadas propiedad de las corporaciones de biotecnología. (La gente común se mantiene afuera en los caóticos 'pleeblands'.) ¿Cómo se derrumbó todo tan rápido? ¿Era él mismo responsable de alguna manera?"La indiferencia ambiental, la ingeniería genética y el bioterrorismo han creado el mundo futuro vaciado y embrujado de la ingeniosa e inquietante novela número 11 de Atwood... Una obra histórica de ficción especulativa, comparable a La naranja mecánica, Un mundo feliz y el revolucionario ruso Zamyatin. Nosotros, Atwood, se ha superado a sí misma". - Reseñas de KirkusMargaret Atwood es la autora de renombre mundial de más de 50 libros de ficción, poesía y ensayos críticos. El multipremiado autor también ha trabajado como dibujante, ilustrador, libretista, dramaturgo y titiritero. Sus novelas incluyen Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias ​​Grace, The Blind Assassin y la trilogía MaddAddam. Su clásico de 1985, El cuento de la criada, fue seguido en 2019 por una secuela, Los testamentos, que ganó el Premio Booker. También ha sido preseleccionada para el Premio Internacional The Man Booker 2005 y 2007 por todo su trabajo.