{"id":641,"date":"2010-04-18T20:20:49","date_gmt":"2010-04-19T04:20:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=641"},"modified":"2010-04-18T20:20:49","modified_gmt":"2010-04-19T04:20:49","slug":"review-the-year-of-the-flood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=641","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Year of the Flood"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>The Year of the Flood <\/em>relates events in <em>Oryx and Crake<\/em> from a different perspective. This is a tricky bit of business.\u00a0 Both books are near-future works of science fiction relating a societal collapse, so being able to get two books out of the same sequence requires the world to be sufficiently rich that there are two compelling viewpoints from which to view the events.\u00a0 Even when that&#8217;s the case, the writer is still presented with the problem of creating two sets of interesting characters.\u00a0 Fortunately, the writer in question is Margaret Atwood, so this all goes pretty well.<\/p>\n<p>Atwood&#8217;s strengths and weaknesses are all on display here.\u00a0 The world is extrapolated from today&#8217;s world in ways that expose the underlying ideals, ideas, and ideologies that shape it.\u00a0 Characters are iconic, but with enough life in them that they aren&#8217;t just tokens to be moved through some intellectual bingo game.\u00a0 On the down side, the iconography and some Dickensean coincidences make the world seem small.\u00a0 The ideas are all big, but the cast seems small.<\/p>\n<p>A large focus of <em>Flood<\/em> is the hybrid Christian\/Environmental Fundamentalist cult, God&#8217;s Gardeners.\u00a0 Atwood does a great job showing how the ideas underlying such a belief system could come to be, how individuals could get drawn into it, and how one would practically run such a thing.\u00a0 It&#8217;s an eye opening set of ideas, put forth in a diverting narrative.<\/p>\n<p>Strongly Recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Year of the Flood relates events in Oryx and Crake from a different perspective. This is a tricky bit of business.\u00a0 Both books are near-future works of science fiction relating a societal collapse, so being able to get two books out of the same sequence requires the world to be sufficiently rich that there [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=641"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":645,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641\/revisions\/645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}