Oryx and Crake

A World Built From What Already Exists

Margaret Atwood has always been precise about a distinction she considers important: she writes speculative fiction, not science fiction. The difference, as she defines it, is that speculative fiction extrapolates from what already exists. Nothing in Oryx and Crake is invented. The biotech corporations, the gated research compounds, the engineered animals — pigoons bred to grow human-compatible organs, rakunks as designer pets, wolvogs as security — all have direct ancestors in research programs and corporate initiatives that were underway when Atwood was writing the novel in 2001 and 2002.

This method produces a world that is immediately, uncomfortably recognizable. The novel does not ask readers to accept science-fictional premises on faith. It asks them to follow existing trajectories a few decades forward — in genetic engineering, in corporate consolidation of research, in the privatization of security and medicine, in the widening gap between the pleeblands and the compounds — and see where they terminate. The answer the novel proposes is: here. In the ruined landscape where Snowman picks through the wreckage and tries to remember what happened.

Jimmy and Crake: The Novel’s Philosophical Argument

Oryx and Crake is structured as an elegy, and its emotional core is a friendship. Jimmy and Crake meet as adolescents in the compounds — the children of corporate scientists, educated in elite bubble schools, surrounded by engineered animals and classified research. They are alike in intelligence and different in almost everything else. Jimmy is a humanist: bad at science, good at words, drawn to art and music and the accumulated mess of human culture. Crake is a rationalist: brilliant at systems, contemptuous of sentiment, convinced at a level beneath argument that human beings are the primary problem with human civilization.

The novel’s philosophical argument is conducted entirely through the texture of their friendship over years: through the games they play, the pornography they watch (Atwood is unflinching about the internet as a delivery system for human cruelty), the careers they take up, the woman they both love. Jimmy senses something wrong in Crake without ever being able to name it. Crake respects Jimmy without being able to be moved by what Jimmy values. The question the novel is turning over throughout is whether Crake’s project — his solution — is a form of madness, or whether it is the most rational response possible to a species that has demonstrated, repeatedly, that it cannot be trusted with its own future.

The Crakers: Crake’s Answer

Crake’s solution is the Crakers: a species of genetically engineered humanoids, designed from scratch to eliminate the features of human nature that Crake believed were responsible for human suffering. They have no tribalism — they are attracted to a range of skin tones by design. They have no religion — they have mating rituals that preclude the need for romantic jealousy. They have no aggression beyond what is needed for survival. They eat leaves. They purr when injured, which heals them. They are, in Crake’s design, humanity corrected.

Snowman — Jimmy, in the aftermath — tends them in the ruined world. He has become a kind of prophet to them, an intermediary between the Crakers and the memory of Crake, who they understand as a god. The scenes between Snowman and the Crakers are the novel’s strangest and most affecting. The Crakers are not threatening. They are gentle, curious, and completely alien in their contentment. What they reveal, by contrast, is how much of what makes Jimmy human — grief, irony, memory, the need to make meaning from loss — Crake specifically designed out of them. The question of whether this is mercy or erasure is one the novel holds open without resolving.

After The Handmaid’s Tale, Before MaddAddam

Atwood published The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985 and Oryx and Crake in 2003. The two novels make an interesting pair: both are dystopias, both are concerned with the abuse of power over bodies and reproduction, both are narrated by survivors looking back. But they are built differently. The Handmaid’s Tale is a novel of political horror — a patriarchal theocracy extrapolated from existing fundamentalist movements. Oryx and Crake is a novel of corporate and scientific horror — a world where the state has largely been replaced by corporations and where the most dangerous person is not a tyrant but a genius with good intentions and no remaining regard for the human.

Oryx and Crake is the first book of the MaddAddam trilogy, followed by The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013). The second book runs parallel to the events of the first, following different survivors through the same plague, and the third brings the narrative threads together. But Oryx and Crake is fully self-contained. It has its own beginning, its own movement, and an ending that answers everything it needs to answer. Readers who want to follow the Crakers and the surviving humans further can. Readers who want to stop here will find that the novel ends where it means to.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — A near-future built entirely from existing science, a friendship that doubles as a philosophical argument, and one of the most quietly devastating endings in contemporary speculative fiction.