I read Oryx and Crake as a teenager for a class on “environmentally dystopian literature” in college and remember really disliking it. If I recall, I felt like it was cheesy and regressive—like, that its views on gender had a frustrating “second wave” quality despite its sort of radical posturing, the characters were really thin with hammy dialogue, the plot played too much on just what it felt like would be shocking (and yet was really kind of low-key IIR as far as “shocking lurid sci-fi” goes)…I guess like, in short, that it felt kind of like a “Saturday morning cartoon for adults” that wanted you take it really seriously, or something like that. This was around 15 years ago now though (and I was a teen) so definitely take it with a grain of salt.
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