Computer game horrors

Perhaps dystopias are coming to resemble fashion revivals, in the sense that, just as the gap between original trend and nostalgic reinterpretation grows narrower and narrower - we've done Nineties Revisited, now for the 2000s - so does the margin between whatever sociotechnological horrors may be imagined and what actually occurs.

Thus in Margaret Atwood's latest novel, Oryx and Crake, a resolutely pessimistic projection of how human cleverness can be expected to put a terminal crimp in all civilisation some time in the fairly near future, a couple of disaffected adolescents, Jimmy and his friend Crake, are playing a computer game called Blood and Roses.

This is "a trading game, along the lines of Monopoly. The Blood side played with human atrocities for the counters... massacres, genocides, that sort of thing. The Roses side played with human achievements, artworks, scientific breakthroughs, stellar works of architecture, helpful inventions. Monuments to the soul's magnificence, they were called in the game ..."

These are privileged young people. They live in luxurious, well-guarded compounds where their parents, a scientific elite, pursue their valued work of messing about with nature in a fashion that would appall the Prince of Wales.

Scroll on a few years and Jimmy has turned out to be a bit of a loser - vaguely artsy, but unmotivated and lacking direction. The only thing he really cares about is words, the odder the better.

This yen for vocabulary is not, however, sufficient to get him the sort of turbo-charged college education enjoyed by his clever, ironical, technocrat buddy, Crake. Their paths diverge, then cross again when Crake invites Jimmy to become involved in his latest wheeze: an artificial universe populated by synthetic neo-humans.

Is this a good idea? Not really. At any rate, it turns out to be fatal for Crake and Oryx, the exquisitely elusive love of Jimmy's life. And none too good for Jimmy's health, either. By the time he becomes the narrator of the story, he is roaming a ruined world, naked and feral, under the alias of Snowman.

The good things about Oryx and Crake are that it is elegantly written, constructed with conspicuous craftsmanship, a good read - though curiously bland, rather like its own descriptions of synthetic food.

Its shortcoming is, oddly for such a formal exercise in imagination, its extreme conventionality; its fundamentalist distrust of science, which is characterised as fundamentally noxious, as opposed to language and the arts,which are credited with an innate virtue.

But possibly its greatest flaw is that its imagined nastinesses are so much less vivid and intellectually troubling than the real thing.