Goodreads Choice Awards Book Club discussion

The Year of the Floodis the 2nd book of the MaddAddam Trilogy, which the group is reading in the lead up to Goodreads Choice Award Winner Science Fiction Category (MaddAddam)

Book Summary:
The times and species have been changing at a rapid rate, and the social compact is wearing as thin as environmental stability. Adam One, the kindly leader of the God's Gardeners--a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion, as well as the preservation of all plant and animal life--has long predicted a natural disaster that will alter Earth as we know it. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life. Two women have survived: Ren, a young trapeze dancer locked inside the high-end sex club Scales and Tails, and Toby, a God's Gardener barricaded inside a luxurious spa where many of the treatments are edible.
Have others survived? Ren's bioartist friend Amanda? Zeb, her eco-fighter stepfather? Her onetime lover, Jimmy? Or the murderous Painballers, survivors of the mutual-elimination Painball prison? Not to mention the shadowy, corrupt policing force of the ruling powers . . .
Meanwhile, gene-spliced life forms are proliferating: the lion/lamb blends, the Mo'hair sheep with human hair, the pigs with human brain tissue. As Adam One and his intrepid hemp-clad band make their way through this strange new world, Ren and Toby will have to decide on their next move. They can't stay locked away . . .

Discussion Questions can be found under the spoiler
(Issued by the publisher and found on http://www.litlovers.com/ )
(view spoiler)[
Discussion Questions
1. How does the friendship between Amanda and Ren grow, despite their differences and the restrictions they face? They meet as children. Who was your greatest ally when you were that age? What do you think of Ren's treatment of Bernice?

2. What survival skills do the novel's female characters possess? Do they find security or vulnerability at Scales and Tales, the AnooYoo Spa, and within the community of Gardeners? What strength does Pilar find in nature, while Lucerne is drawn to artificial beauty?

3. How do Adam One's motivations compare to Zeb's? In their world, what advantages do men have? Are they really “advantages”?

4. Discuss Toby's parents and their fate. What does their story illustrate about the dangers of an unregulated and corrupt drug industry? What motivates Toby to become a healer?

5. How does Adam One's explanation of creation and the fall of humanity compare to more standard Judeo-Christian ideas? What does he offer his followers, beyond an understanding of the planet and the creatures that inhabit it?

6. Discuss the father figures in Ren's life: her stepfather, Zeb; her biological father, Frank; and eventually Mordis. What did they teach her about being a woman? How did they shape her expectations of Jimmy?

7. As a refugee from Texas, Amanda is an outsider, facing constant risk. Would you have harbored her? Why is Ren so impressed by her?

8. What is the result of a penal system like Painball? How does it influence the citizens' attitude toward crime?

9. Should Toby have honored Pilar's deathbed wish that she become an Eve? How did the lessons in beekeeping serve Toby in other ways as well?

10. Crake's BlyssPlus pill offers many false promises. What are they, and what was Crake really striving for (chapter 73)? If human beings are the greatest problem for the natural world, could they also provide solutions less drastic than Crake's? How?

11. In what ways do the novel's three voices—Toby's, Ren's, and Adam One's—complement one another? What unique perspective is offered in each narration?

12. Explore the lyrics from The God's Gardeners Oral Hymnbook. What do they say about the Gardener theology and the nature of their faith? Adam One does not always tell the truth to his congregation. Is well-meant lying ever acceptable?

13. Margaret Atwood's fiction often displays “gallows humor.” Can a thing be dire and funny at the same time? Must we laugh or die?

14. The Year of the Flood covers the same time period as Oryx and Crake, and contains a number of the same characters — (“Snowman,” a student at the Martha Graham Academy and “the last man on earth”) and Glenn (“Crake,” who studied at the Watson-Crick Institute), as well as Bernice, Jimmy's hostile college room-mate, Amanda, a live-in artist girlfriend, Ren (“Brenda,”) whom he remembers briefly in Oryx and Crake as a high-school fling, Jimmy's mother, who runs away to become an activist, and the God's Gardeners, whom he mentions as a fringe green cult. Re-read the final pages of both books. What do you predict for the remaining characters? Should the Gardeners execute the Painballers? Why? Why not? Would you?

15. What parallels did you see between The Year of the Flood and current headlines?
(hide spoiler)]

I hope everyone likes this. I read it a couple of years ago and really loved it. I'm 1/2 way through and I like it but I really think Year of the Flood is better.

Someone actually recorded the hymns that are in this novel: http://yearoftheflood.com/how-the-mus...

I've just added discussion questions to the original post above :)

I enjoyed it, though not as much as Oryx and Crake. I liked getting a different perspective on the catastrophe.

I think what bugged me most was all of the sermons and songs. I felt that the teachings of the Gardeners were conveyed rather well in the narratives of Ren and Toby. Included as they were, it just served to disrupt the narrative.

Regardless, I still enjoyed the book and I look forward to the final installment.

I followed the link above, but I didn't see any discussion questions.

Hey Valerie, the discussion questions are under the spoiler. The link was just crediting the website where I found them.

Are you using a mobile app and therefore have trouble with spoilers? If so I can message them to you if you want.

I loved it just as much as Oryx and Crake. And, I felt the sermons and songs were a wonderful addition to the story. It made the religion more real and at the same time served as a reminder of how contrived our current religions are. It's not just the morals and actions behind a religion (which are pretty similar across all of them and to me are just basic human morals) .. it's the way everyday people that we currently know of are distorted into saints and used to develop those teachings. I found them very important to the story and the world building.

The only thing I had a bit of trouble accepting were the choice of surviving characters .. the whole world is more or less dead and the only people alive are the ones that know each other. I guess it's just a story and doesn't aim for realism, but these kind of things bug me ..

Trying to get a-hold to a copy of MaddAddam.

There is nothing about this world that doesn't frighten me. On a previous discussion about Oryx and Crake, I pointed out what it says about a culture based on the games their children play. And then Jimmy and Crake go home in the evenings after school to watch atrocities on live internet-TV.

Huge disappointment. I didn't like much Onyx and Crake either but this was still let down. She has now written two big books from that sociaty and still I feel that we don't know anything. Just some stuff that scientist, or clever boy did with his humans and couple of survivors, how about everything else? Too many unanswered quoestions, just doing same story from other point of view didn't make it interesting. The end, once again, was so.. stupid. Well, I give up now with this serie, most likely with genre too and Atwood, at least for awile.

I think that The Year of the Flood gains a lot after reading MaddAddam, and thus the whole trilogy. I liked Oryx and Crake better but still as the whole, the trilogy is exciting and different from many books about possible future I have read so far. I also liked in this installment the use of sermons and hymns, it reminds me of some experimenting, but classic authors such as Dos Passos and adds to the authenticity of the story.

90% of the society and everything in it makes me wanna scream "YOU ******* HIPSTERS DO YOU HEAR YOURSELVES?"

Remember Jimmy's friends who thought people would live crawling single-file under ground in the future, and felt future generations would deserve it?

-_-

Finally got a library copy. I like the Crakers well enough, but Crake...seriously, he made them to NOT EVOLVE, and biology 101 can say why that's a bad idea.

And I disagree with him that technology will run its course and no more ore will be mined. plate tectonics should deal with that eventually. Or the next thing to come along will go genetics whete we did physics.

I'm at 21%. I'm at the "do I, or don't I like it" stage. Is it worth investing my time in it or not? I'll go a bit longer because the whole trilogy has been highly recommended by friends.

I'm not keen on the sermons either... I find I'm skipping through those sections a bit.

Some parts are really and truly disgusting... (view spoiler)[... they also ran corpse disposals, harvesting organs for transplant, then running the gutted carcasses through the SecretBurgers grinders (hide spoiler)] but hey, its the future right ?? Anything's possible.

✿ ♥ Heather ♥ ✿ wrote: "I'm at 21%. I'm at the "do I, or don't I like it" stage. Is it worth investing my time in it or not? I'll go a bit longer because the whole trilogy has been highly recommended by friends.

I'm n..."

As I said, you can tell a lot about a society based on their entertainment. I'm not even comfortable listing the sort of stuff Crake and Jimmy watch after school. What's truly frightening about it is: it's not banned. They don't hide what they're watching or how they're watching. That's just what entertainment looks like to these people!

And one of the shows they watch? In book three it's stated to have a department store.

51%

Is anyone else, or was anyone else confused about the timeline of this book and Ren and Toby's viewpoints ?

Year 25 can't be 25 yrs after the main disaster from oryx and crake cos Jimmys just been mentioned at being at a high school.

Can someone shed some light ?

I thought that Year 25 was 25 years after the creation of The Gardeners.