Many things irritated me about this dismal, leaden, simple-minded satire of biotech and corporatocracy. I'm unkindly disposed to stories told in flashback, for a start, and also to present-tense narration, and this book alternates between the two. My tolerance for evil genius characters is low, and lower still when they sneakily plot the demise of all mankind. And if there's one type of character I like even less than that, it's young male slobs, and these two guys take up 95% of the bloated pagecount without ever approaching multidimensionality. There's one other character, an ex-child sex slave cum-exotic Oriental mystery woman-cum new Eve whose dialogue, though minimal, is indescribably exasperating. There are some pointless and mildly offensive references to Asperger's and neurotypicality. The corporations, products, websites etc. all have idiotic 50's-style wacky phonetically spelled names like ReJoovenEsence, Noodie News, AnooYoo, and NiteeNite.com (a site where you watch people off themselves, duh). Atwood succumbed to a serious case of sci-fi neologism-itis here. It's a boring book; very little happens and the non-ending would be infuriating if it didn't come as such a relief.

The gene-splicing at the heart of the plot is laughable. Hey, what do you get when you cross a raccoon with a skunk? A "rakunk"! What's that, a spider-goat hybrid called a spoat? A snake-rat (you guessed it, "snat") which is apparently... drumroll... a snake... with the head of a rat... FML.

But what irked me most about Atwood's craptastic connect-the-dots dystopia was the lack of imaginative effort. Other than the Doctor Moreau-style menagerie of mutant freaks, her "near-future" doesn't seem to have moved on at all from 2003. There's internet (used exclusively for snuff porn and live news feeds — strangely e-commerce isn't a thing in this world of all-powerful consumer-facing corporations) but no smartphones; CD-ROMs and DVDs are cutting edge tech; emails go back and forth but she apparently wasn't familiar with instant messaging; résumés are still sent out by mail. There are glaring inconsistencies like New York having been relocated due to sea-level rise but Seattle and Fiji apparently being just fine. All of this isn't bad in itself, but it demonstrates laziness, a lack of interest in the future, and by extension a lack of interest in the present she's trying to criticize. Atwood rejected the tag "science fiction", possibly in an attempt to absolve herself of the responsibility for putting some thought into her future or maybe because she's a snob, but I don't see how her preferred term, the quibbling "speculative fiction", gets her off the hook. When we read a historical novel we expect a basic effort from the author to make the setting convincing; surely novels set in the future should meet the same standard. The whole thing comes off as condescending, arrogant, the product of a laurel-ensconced doyenne who can do no wrong.

And on top of it all she asks us to believe in a North-American high-speed rail network!