The human drama that is the vehicle across this drear landscape is not quite as sturdy. Like a mystery writer, [Margaret Atwood] must tailor her characters to the demands of the plot, which she does with a rather liberal deployment of red herrings. The heroine, Oryx, sometimes seems to have superhuman powers, especially in the way her italicized advisories pop up with no explanation all along the way. But in fact these fleeting visions of a seemingly immaterial, possibly cybernetic Oryx are only a novelistic artifice, not part of the science-fiction armature. A bit of a cheat, but it does keep one on the edge of his or her seat, as the story is building to its climax -- which is a little over-hasty to my taste, and even inconclusive, leaving the door open to humankind scraping through by means of an Adam-and-Eve ex machina. But that is a small cop-out and amounts to no more than a will-o'-the-wisp glimmer against the overall majestic darkness of Atwood's Go{dier}terdammerung.