A novelist cooks up a plausible, scary disaster

FICTION
The whole place was like a doll's house that had been turned upside down and stepped on."

This is Margaret Atwood's startling description of our world after the eponymous disaster that sets the stage for "The Year of the Flood." It's the same bleak stage on which her novel "Oryx and Crake" took place: a world in which excessive corporate growth and genetic engineering have brought about a society that's part Orwellian (with robot bees that spy on citizens), part Wellesian (with genetically modified pigs and plants), and part-Sinclairian (with hamburger joints that may well recycle human body parts into their meat.

And that's before the massive plague that wipes out almost all of humanity.

Like its predecessor, "The Year of the Flood" is a cautionary tale about the Promethean perils of playing god -- a genre that should probably be referred to as slap-on-the-wrist sci-fi. Armed with an imaginative power that manages to both amuse and disturb (sometimes simultaneously), this novel is as much about the experience of surviving in an upside-down, stepped-on world as it is about the "innovations" that got us there.

"Oryx and Crake" saw the future through the eyes of men; "The Year of the Flood" views this same future through the eyes of two women: Toby and Ren. Both are members of God's Gardeners, a persecuted eco-faith whose members decry the meat-eating and nature-destroying corporate society around them. Atwood does a marvelous job of building an entire religion from scratch, complete with shrine (a rooftop garden in the center of urban squalor), saints and martyrs (including Dian Fossey and Mahatma Gandhi), holidays (including Predators' Day) and hymns.

While the present action of the story takes place after the plague (the prophetic cataclysm that the God's Gardeners refer to as the "waterless flood"), most of the story is told in flashback. Toby, hiding out in the ruins of a day-spa, dwells on her rise into the upper echelons of the eco-faith's hierarchy; Ren, an exotic dancer quarantined in a flashy gentlemen's club, recounts her youth among both the God's Gardeners and, later, in the corporate world that will eventually destroy everything.

Only a writer with Atwood's skill, imagination, and insight into societal roles could make this setup believable instead of ridiculous, more of a frightening what-if scenario instead of a casual farce. It certainly helps if you've read "Oryx and Crake" (as several characters reappear in these pages), but even if you haven't, "The Year of the Flood" makes for a highly entertaining read.

Let's just hope its frighteningly plausible world remains a fiction and not a reality.

Zak M. Salih is a freelance writer based in Washington.