To me it is more Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood.
Then, she added perverted(early on)/misanthropic deviant genius to destroy it, a character that lacked even basic verisimilitude by himself, or in context?
While the plot was enjoyable as easy reading, the background to me was like someone took one of those space-age-futuristic (or maybe modern solarpunk) landscapes and wrote "I disapprove" over it in red ink as a form of criticism.
Access to the "utopia" was tied to employment and compliance to a corporate agenda.
Given that elite was shown as hyper-meritocratic (even in the dynamic between two main characters), I think that's the utopia-like part.
> compliance to a corporate agenda
The least-bad large entity agenda throughout history. Again they have a pretty prominent example where elites are working on more efficient food production, among other things. It's like the Green revolution (which many people also didn't like because it was unnatural) :)
> damaged world, and the damage that their own work caused
Was it more damaged than real world? I guess I don't remember very well, or maybe I was reading it thru the same lens as I read real-world doomerism, where "Millenials are poor and doomed" articles are contradicted by basic statistics.
The corporations and large entities are not really defensible given that one of the plot points in Oryx and Crake is creating a sentient species to showcase genetic options for sale to parents, and another is the creation of a designer drug for those outside the wall with a secret side effect of sterility to address population concerns.
The entire story is told retrospectively from a post civilization world ruined by over extraction and commercialism. I don’t think it really falls into “millennial doomerism” since it was published in 2003 which is when I think we were still in the “gen x nihilism” phase of generational griping.
That is barely wrong at all (is it even worse than animal experimentation)
> creation of a designer drug for those outside the wall with a secret side effect of sterility to address population concerns" How is that their agenda?
It's mostly governments'/people's agenda that they are implementing, just like cheap food.
> ruined by over extraction and commercialism
It was ruined by deus ex machina in the most unbelievable way, that was my original point. Atwood obviously doesn't like the idea of such a society - both a very efficient, very meritocratic elite catering to society's whims and being amply rewarded for it; and the common people acting out their actual preferences. My impression is that she's part of a large "idea space" that thinks that, more or less, elites should rule but altruistically, and the proles should be told what's best for them. In process of creating a "dystopia" of the opposites, she created an utopia in my view. And then she couldn't even credibly destroy it!