Nice article this week at Strange Horizons (note that I have nothing to do with the articles department, so this is praise rather than bragging): "The Failure of Fahrenheit 451," by Jeremy Smith. It has some nice insights about Fahrenheit, and it also serves as the first review of Oryx and Crake I've seen that takes the novel on its own terms, as a dystopian allegory and "if this goes on" Cassandraist (nice word) warning.
Jed, just in case you haven’t seen it before, here’s a link to an article by Robert Sawyer in which he bashes _Oryx & Crake_ for being not-very-good dystopian SF:
Thanks, Sarah! Interesting review. It seems a little odd to me, though; it sounds like Sawyer is reviewing the concept of dystopian sf (and saying that all dystopias are implausible because everything’s good and getting better), rather than really talking about what Atwood’s doing in particular. What struck me about the Jeremy Smith article is that he’s saying that works like Fahrenheit and Oryx aren’t specific predictions of the future, so much as allegories about the kinds of dystopian futures that might arise in the real world. (Like Bradbury saying that most of Fahrenheit has come true, even though we don’t literally have government workers burning books per se most of the time.)
(As for Sawyer’s main point, though I tend to share many of the dreams of techno-utopians, I’m less sanguine than Sawyer is about them coming true. I personally don’t really believe that 50 years from now we’ll have either dystopia or utopia; I think we’ll have a world in which people muddle through one way and another, pretty much the way people always have.)