BIOPERVERSITY.('Oryx and Crake')(Book Review)

The novelist Margaret Atwood has wandered off from us before: once, in 1986, to the mid-twenty-first century, for a feminist dystopia, "The Handmaid's Tale,"in which women are enslaved according to their reproductive usefulness; another time, in 1996, to the nineteenth century, to make thrifty use of her graduate work at Radcliffe in the faux-Victorian novel "Alias Grace."These were forays and raids. In her chronicling of contemporary sexual manners and politics, Atwood has always been interested in pilfering popular forms--comic books, gothic tales, detective novels, science fiction--in order to make them do her more literary bidding. Her previous novel, "The Blind ...