<b>The long-awaited new novel from Margaret Atwood. <i>The Year of the Flood</i> is a dystopic masterpiece and a testament to her visionary power. </b><br><br>The times and species have been changing at a rapid rate, and the social compact is wearing as thin as environmental stability. Adam One, the kindly leader of the God's Gardeners - a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion, as well as the preservation of all plant and animal life - has long predicted a natural disaster that will alter Earth as we know it. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life. Two women have survived: Ren, a young trapeze dancer locked inside the high-end sex club Scales and Tails, and Toby, a God's Gardener barricaded inside a luxurious spa where many of the treatments are edible.<br><br>Have others survived? Ren's bioartist friend Amanda? Zeb, her eco-fighter stepfather? Her onetime lover, Jimmy? Or the murderous Painballers, survivors of the mutual-elimination Painball prison? Not to mention the shadowy, corrupt policing force of the ruling powers . . .<br><br>Meanwhile, gene-spliced life forms are proliferating: the lion/lamb blends, the Mo'hair sheep with human hair, the pigs with human brain tissue. As Adam One and his intrepid hemp-clad band make their way through this strange new world, Ren and Toby will have to decide on their next move. They can't stay locked away . . .<br><br>By turns dark, tender, violent, thoughtful, and uneasily hilarious, <i>The Year of the Flood</i> is Atwood at her most brilliant and inventive.<br><br><br><i>From the Hardcover edition.</i>
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A Post-Apocalyptic Glimpse of Human Grace
If the world as we know it were to spin uncontrollably into an Orwellian or Huxleyian orbit, where the consumption of animals sped down a slippery slope of barbaric proportions and power-hungry corporations manufactured pharmaceuticals to purposely make us sick and bio-engineered organisms to nurture our vanity, then reality would come very close to Margaret Atwood's novel, The Year of the Flood. Some who cry conspiracy would say that that world has already come and its degradation upheld as evidenced in Atwood's fiction. I, on the other hand, compare Atwood to those other great authors, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, as a voice to be heeded not for imitating life, but rather warning us of what life might one day become. The world in The Year of the Flood has undergone an apocalyptic change, the "waterless flood". Told from the viewpoint of a survivor who recounts her experiences from before the flood, the novel is a portrayal not so much of the characters, who indeed vividly jump from the page, but of the society over which this flood must wash. With laser-like precision, the author's unique lens skillfully leads the reader through a dissection and analysis of our human collective. As painful as this sounds, when she portrays our materialism and animal consumerism in the extreme dimensions existing prior to the flood, how can we not see a clear comparison between fiction and our present day world? The CorpSeCorps is our government in bed with Helthwyzer, the pharmaceutical company. Happicuppa, the coffee company that laces us with "gen-mod" might very well be our Starbucks. In this world, life is perhaps how one might imagine man were he reach his lowest state, completely fallen into ultimate corruption through the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Technology and science has advanced to such a degree that we have full reign over biological creation and animals deserve no reverence. Humanity has reached the goal of supremacy over nature. I think it's safe to say...
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