Clute on Atwood

3 Comments

Last night I followed a link from a Boingboing message board (link provided by Alan Bostick) to John Clute's harsh review of Atwood's Oryx and Crake from Science Fiction Weekly. I would expect reviewers from the sf world not to be kind to this book, given how much Atwood's been trashing science fiction in her publicity statements about the book, but I trust Clute more than I might trust a lot of other reviewers looking at an sf book that was written by a literary fiction author and published as literary fiction. (Even so, there are a couple of points on which I suspect, on no evidence and without having read the book myself, that Clute may've missed something; for example, I'm guessing that the presence of the name "Oryx" in the title suggests that the character may be intended to be a bit more important than Clute suggests that she is.)

But the main reason I mention this review is that Clute's the only reviewer I can think of who'd use a phrase like "the sclerotic exiguity of its backstory." It's a rare review that sends me to the dictionary.

(Hey, Jay, consider "exiguity"—or even "sclerotic exiguity"—a Story Words suggestion.)

3 Responses to “Clute on Atwood”

  1. Zak

    I dunno… ‘Sclerotic exiguity’ just seems like remplissage to me.

    reply

  2. Jay Lake

    So let it be written, so let it be done.

    http://storyword.blogspot.com/2003_08_17_storyword_archive.html#106138125932922471

    or…

    http://snurl.com/23mu

    reply

  3. Hannah

    I’ve got some fumbling attempts to dissect why I thought Handmaid’s Tale worked and Oryx & Crake didn’t back in my blog from late May, after I read the latter. Push to shove, I think it was mostly that Oryx fell into all the traps that litarachur fanatics like to accuse genre work of. The writing was pretty and some of the world-building was neat, but the story isn’t personal — it’s a tour of the world with nothing more to offer but, “This is bad!” whereas what I loved about Handmaid’s was how the “This is bad!” elements meant something to the people involved, threatened their lives, but other, more important, things, too.

    It’s a great example of “an idea is not a story,” really. Feh.

    I’d love to pin Atwood down and ask her what she really means when she says “sf” and “speculative fiction” and such, how she’s drawing lines between them.

    reply

Join the Conversation