This is the plot of Margaret Atwood's newest novel, The Year of the Flood: Ren and Toby, survivors of a massive plague, tell how they ended up in the situations that saved their lives. They were once members of the God's Gardeners, a religious cult led by Adam One that merges aspects of Christianity with fanatical respect for the natural world and green science. The God's Gardeners predicted a natural disaster of epic proportions that has apparently come to pass. What's going to happen to these pathetic remnants of humanity now? The fate of individual characters and of the species is as much up to the reader at the end of The Year of the Flood as it is at the end of its companion novel, Oryx and Crake.The latter should be read before the former, since it's hard to imagine reading The Year of the Flood without already knowing that the Waterless Flood isn't the natural disaster the Gardeners predicted. And readers unfamiliar with Oryx and Crake will miss many an oblique reference and a clever intertwining of character and plot. This isn't a flaw, per se: Atwood's novel flourishes because it provides a ground-level look at a prior narrative of what happens when the corporate powers that be clench an iron fist powered by science and technology.

In Oryx and Crake, we have front-row seats to the creation and dissemination of the grotesquely fatal plague the Gardeners call the Waterless Flood, but in The Year of the Flood, we see a totally different and in many ways more painful perspective. Oryx and Crake portrayed the horrifically efficient-or sometimes just horrific-bioengineering innovations to recycle used-up bodies or products, deliver nutriment, alter the body or provide unthinkable pain or pleasure as the misused innovations of some overly enthusiastic scientists.

The Year of the Flood shows us the lust for power and the staggering greed that underlie every invention and that dragged the Corporations and their CorpSeCorps henchmen into power. We meet Amanda, a coldly capable girl forced to age too quickly when she escapes a Texan refugee camp that the corporate government can't be bothered with; we meet Toby, whose mother became a victim of HelthWyzer's machinations and who ended up the sex slave of Blanco, the manager of a salmonella-ridden, mystery meat-peddling SecretBurger chain. It's a sad state of affairs when the best-treated character in what the Gardeners call the Exfernal World is Ren, a trapeze artist for the sex palace Scales and Tails. Still, we learn that Scales treats its star girls like gold but leaves its diseased temps crumpled in back alleys when they're drained of use.

The terror of this book arrives in a barrage of ways in which people and objects and philosophies are valued only for their power to generate profit. The fun of this book arrives in a barrage of satirical corporate wordplay. Atwood has always delighted in sending up the very evil masterminds who torment her protagonists by imposing upon them the most ridiculous possible catchphrases, even in the otherwise bleak A Handmaid's Tale. We still have the product names of Oryx and Crake-Happicuppa coffee, BlyssPluss, AnooYoo-and we're treated to some meta-major-like course names such as "Yoga for Middle Management" and "Dance Calisthenics." The inclusion of some of Adam One's sermons and prosaically trite hymns from the God's Gardeners' hymnbook rounds off the surreality of what would otherwise be an overwhelmingly brutal existence. One would hope that Atwood's endnote reminding us that we can use these hymns and sermons for our own meditation is yet another aspect of her satire rather than actual encouragement, as the God's Gardeners are as cartoonish as the staff of the state-regulated bordello consortium Seksmart.

In the end, the intensification of both the clownish and the terrifying aspects of today's corporate society are what make The Year of the Flood so vivid. If environmentalism were still the most popular issue of today's news, the novel might have come off as trite, pandering to the front pages. But it isn't, and it's not. Instead, The Year of the Flood is an honest intimation of what Atwood does not want us to become.