A post-apocalyptic flashback autobiography from some guy who was friends with the man who invents the bioweapon which immenatizes the apocalypse the story takes place within. Snowman is worshipped by the genetically engineered species this guy was working on, fabricating a logos of their origins and his relation to their creator, as well as his (deceased) love interest who occasionally appears to him during peak delusion.

Semi-unexplained climate apocalypse feels like a lazy setting for a doomsday story like this. It was certainly trendy at the time (the wake of Al Gore, etc.) and climate crisis isn’t verboten for no good reason, but leaning on that when the origin of your doomsday is the eradication of man which implicitly caused the climate crisis feels more like doomer propaganda than a cool plausible setting.

Another point of contention which I flip-flopped on when reading the book was the misandry thinly veiled as the (at first) painfully 1-dimensional misogyny from the two main characters. It’s most noticeable in Jimmy’s youth, as a poor characterization of boyish adolescence, but gets rounded out when he graduates to legitimate home wrecking and playboy lifestyles towards the middle of the book. I was going to omit the critique until the end of the book when it was reiterated as one of the main themes (the vileness of man) up until the book ends without giving any sound justification or explanation for why the two vile characters behave(d) the way they did, but instead passes it off as a “and they live among us everyday” kind of fear mongering. As if it’s normal for kids to watch CP, beheadings, beastiality, etc. and smoke weed like “yeah dude, this rocks.” The least believable part of the story is that this somehow gets normalized in the future when everything becomes commoditized, but it’s still taboo. Jimmy’s backstory ends up serving no purpose other than to tell us about Crake, who’s backstory absents itself of any explanation about how such a kid could go from A to B, where A is resenting the man sleeping with his mother to B being eugenics, murder, human trafficking, etc.

The characters aren’t *just* underdeveloped, they’re inhuman (no pun intended).

The book started low (6.25), improved during the academic phase (6.75), and then fell back off with the unfulfilling ending (6.5) which didn’t particularly make me want to read more of the series, let alone Margie Marge.

"He shouldn’t torture himself. He shouldn’t dangle impossibilities in front of himself as if he were some caged, wired up lab animal performing lab experiments on his own brain” – is a nice, appropriately subtle but informative foreshadowing of exactly what Snowman is.

Painstaking characterization of the Crakers reproductive tendencies is akin to the lengthy detailing of Le Guin’s descriptions of Androgyns of Left Hand of Darkness. The story structure is also similar to Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed,” but less captivating because the transition from the start of the book to the climax is transparently telegraphed, whereas the former’s development is more mysterious and intriguing. No penalty for not being mysterious since that’s not what the book was going for – it was going for gasps, and the nonchalant normalization of CP seemed irreverent (unlike other books tagged with vile which at least handle the weighty subjects with care – this one seemed to just reach into the toolbag of “worst shit you can think of” and then hit a foul ball with it).

Weird idea that dreams and singing are indelible features of humanity which can’t be gene-edited away, but love, desire, and sex are more malleable. What’s she trying to say?

Also disliked the handwavey hackerman ex machina – if it’s so easy that even a kid can do it, then why not take the time to make it not sound stupid in the book? Or make it more believable like “Crake stole someone’s login” instead of making him sound like a super genius who still chooses to smoke weed and watch nudy news and liveleak beheadings. By itself, would be forgivable, but since it’s used to build an offensively unrealistic character, I tack on another minus minus.

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