This is a potential dystopian classic and should sell accordingly. (May 6) Forecast: Readers who know Atwood primarily as the author of The Handmaid's Tale will be thrilled by this return to the future those who follow her work more closely will be even more impressed. Chesterton once wrote of the ''thousand romances that lie secreted in The Origin of Species.'' Atwood has extracted one of the most hair-raising of them, and one of the most brilliant. The mystery on which this riveting, disturbing tale hinges is how Crake and Oryx and civilization vanished, and how Jimmy-who also calls himself ''the Snowman,'' after that other rare, hunted specimen, the Abominable Snowman-survived. She teaches the Crakers how to cope in the world and goes out on secret missions. He's procured Oryx to be his personal assistant. Crake is designing the Crakers-a new, multicolored placid race of human beings, smelling vaguely of citron. Jimmy meets Oryx much later-after college, after Crake gets Jimmy a job with ReJoovenEsence. She was sold by her Southeast Asian parents, taken to the city and eventually made into a sex ''pixie'' in some distant country. Oryx's story is a counterpoint to Jimmy and Crake's affluent adolescence. The two friends first encountered Oryx on the Net she was the eight-year-old star of a pedophilic film on a site called HottTotts.

Even Jimmy's mother-who ran off and joined an ecology guerrilla group when Jimmy was an adolescent-respected Crake, already a budding genius. His best friend was ''Crake,'' the name originally his handle in an interactive Net game, Extinctathon. Jimmy grew up in a world split between corporate compounds (gated communities metastasized into city-states) and pleeblands (unsafe, populous and polluted urban centers). As Jimmy, apparently the last human being on earth, makes his way back to the RejoovenEsencecompound for supplies, the reader is transported backwards toward that cataclysmic event, its full dimensions gradually revealed. The triple whammy of runaway social inequality, genetic technology and catastrophic climate change, has finally culminated in some apocalyptic event.

In her latest, the future is even bleaker. Atwood has visited the future before, in her dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale.

Oryx book