Oryx and Crake

Margaret Atwood

This is the prequel to The Year of the Flood. Or more accurately, the The Year... is the sequel book to Oryx and Crake, but the book's timelines are concurrent, with The Year... just a bit earlier. It is just that I read The Year... first. To be honest, having read The Year..., you don't need to read the original. There is no new information. I was expecting some back story, some interesting development to give more understanding about how the whole GMO gone wild scenario developed. I was sorely disappointed. We follow Jimmy (Snowman) after the breakdown of society and as he is "monitoring" the Crakers. We get uninteresting background, with no real new depth to Oryx or Crake. I think had I read this book first, I would never have read The Year... so I am at least glad that my order was "correct".

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Insurgent

Veronica Roth

Book 2 of Divergent trilogy

As a reminder, this is a dystopian future Chicago where society is divided into factions. Each faction highlights one character trait above all others, believing that the lack of this trait led to the downfall of culture in the past. To the Candor faction values truth above all else, Abnegation values selflessness, Amity - peace, Erudite - knowledge and Dauntless - courage. There is a sorting routine where young people coming of age are tested and get to chose their faction based on their test results. As we saw in the first installment, there are also a few who are Divergent, who test aptitude for multiple factions. This volume picks up where Divergent left off, which the attack of the Abnegation by the Erudite, under the auspices of the Dauntless. It turns out that the Erudite are setting out to control all of society and our heros Four and Tris (both Divergent Dauntless) are working to prevent total control by the Erudite. So in some ways, it is a typical insurgency novel.

What I particularly like about this series is the way we are able to pull out particular traits which are valuable and see what life and society would be like if those are elevated to be solely valuable. Roth is quite good at probing the dark side of truth, or peace, or courage and make us wonder if it really is valuable. I am sure that somewhere the message is that we must mix all the values in order to have a health person or society, but we are not there yet. We get to see the development of awareness in the characters and they all develop at different rates. Add into this a pretty good political mess as the factions and the factionless work behind the scenes and publicly to change opinion. We are never exactly sure who is telling the truth (as is true in politics). Finally, add in an Inception like sequence where Tris is in a simulation. I found myself never quite sure when the simulation was over. I love this stuff.

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