Alternate Realities: A Scifi Book Club discussion

Maddaddam got the goodreads scifi reader's choice. I have read Oryx and Crake but have not read The Year of the Flood or Maddaddam. Has anyone read all three? I really liked Oryx and Crake. Until I looked up Maddaddam I didn't even know Oryx and Crake was part of a series. Are the other books as good?

I tried to read Year of the Flood but I hated Oryx and Crake so much that I couldn't bring myself to read it. My understanding is that Year of the Flood deals with the people that Snowman encounters right at the end of Oryx and Crake, and Maddaddam brings the two stories together.

I have read all three & they are all worth reading. I didn't find the final book to be quite up there with the first two, however it does tie everything together and is by no means bad. I would probably give 4-4.5 stars for the first two and 3.5 for the third.

The first two books, all the dialog made me want to shout, "You ******* hipsters do you hear yourselves?!"

Remember Snowman-the-Jimmy's friends who talked about how future generations would live crawling single-file underground, and deserve it? -_-

So far the cast in MaddAddam is more tolerable, but one of the atrocities that Jimmy and Crake would watch in the afternoons after school? It has a department store.

I thought Oryx and Crake was well done and my favorite of all three. Year of the Flood follows the same timeline but from the perspective of the plebelands (outside the corporate compounds). It is very well done. While O&C was left open-ended, I thought the ending didn't necessarily beg for a sequel. YotF's ending needed a sequel, and so we have (the weakest part of the series) MaddAdam. The characters whose backgrounds are one of the main focuses of the book are not really that compelling. You get more of the Crakers but they become really annoying. Toby (whom we are introduced to in YotF) loses her badassness and becomes a shining example of the romantic female trope. The parts I most enjoyed in MaddAdam were those that reminded me of the first two books rather than the new stuff added to the world Atwood built.

I can't say that I wished I had only read O&C (which I thought ended with the perfect amount of open-endedness) because I enjoyed YotF a lot. But reading YotF necessarily leads one to MaddAdam, which is definitely something I wished I skipped.