Oryx and Crake


Oryx and Crake is a 2003 novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood. She has described the novel as speculative fiction and adventure romance, rather than pure science fiction, because it does not deal with things "we can't yet do or begin to do", yet goes beyond the amount of realism she associates with the novel form. It focuses on a lone character called Snowman, who finds himself in a bleak situation with only creatures called Crakers to keep him company. The reader learns of his past, as a boy called Jimmy, and of genetic experimentation and pharmaceutical engineering that occurred under the purview of Jimmy's peer, Glenn "Crake".
The book was first published by McClelland and Stewart. It was shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, as well as for the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction.
A television adaptation of Oryx and Crake and its follow-up novels, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam, was being helmed by Darren Aronofsky by 2014, under the working title "MaddAddam", but was dropped by HBO by October 2016. Currently, an adaptation of the MaddAddam trilogy is in development at Paramount Television and Anonymous Content.

Plot summary

The novel focuses on a post-apocalyptic character called "Snowman", living near a group of primitive human-like creatures whom he calls Crakers. Flashbacks reveal that Snowman was once a boy named Jimmy who grew up in a world dominated by multinational corporations and privileged compounds for the families of their employees. Near starvation, Snowman decides to return to the ruins of a compound named RejoovenEsense to search for supplies, even though it is overrun by dangerous genetically engineered hybrid animals. He concocts an explanation for the Crakers, who regard him as a teacher, and begins his foraging expedition.
In Snowman's recollection of past events, Jimmy's family moves to the HelthWyzer compound, where his father works as a genetic engineer. Jimmy meets and befriends a brilliant science student named Glenn. Jimmy begins to refer to him as Crake when he uses that name in an online trivia game called Extinctathon. Jimmy and Crake spend much of their leisure time playing online games, smoking "skunkweed", and watching underground videos such as live executions, graphic surgery, Noodie News, frog squashing, and child pornography. During one of their child pornography viewings, Jimmy is very much lovestruck by the gazing eyes of a young girl seen in the porn.
After graduating from high school, Crake attends the highly respected Watson-Crick Institute, where he studies advanced bioengineering, but Jimmy ends up at the loathed Martha Graham Academy, where students study humanities, only valued for their propaganda applications. Jimmy gets a job writing ad copy, while Crake becomes a bioengineer at RejoovenEsense. Crake uses his prominent position to create the Crakers, peaceful, gentle, herbivorous humanoids who have sexual intercourse only during limited polyandrous breeding seasons. His stated purpose for the Crakers, actually a deliberate deception, is to create "floor models" of all the possible options a family could choose in the genetic manipulation of their future children. Crake's bio-engineering team consists of the most expert players gathered from the online Extinctathon community.
Crake tells Jimmy about another very important project, a Viagra-like super-pill called BlyssPluss, which also promises health and happiness, but secretly causes sterilization in order to address overpopulation. Crake officially hires Jimmy to help market it. At the Rejoov compound, Jimmy eventually sees a human in the Craker habitat and recognizes her as the girl from the pornographic video. Unaware of Jimmy's obsession with her, Crake explains that her name is Oryx and that he has hired her as a teacher for the Crakers. Oryx notices Jimmy's feelings for her and makes herself sexually available to him, despite also being Crake's romantic partner. As their relationship progresses, Jimmy becomes increasingly fearful that Crake has found out about it. He also makes a promise to both Oryx and Crake that he will look after the Crakers if anything happens to them.
After Crake's wonder drug BlyssPluss is widely distributed, a global pandemic, deliberately caused by it, breaks out and begins wiping out the human race and causing mass chaos outside of the protected Rejoov compound. Realizing that this was planned by Crake all along, and sensing that something dangerous is happening regarding Crake and Oryx, Jimmy grabs a gun to confront Crake, who is returning with Oryx from outside the compound and needs Jimmy to let them in. Crake presents himself to Jimmy with his arm around an unconscious Oryx, saying that he and Jimmy are immune to the virus. Jimmy lets them in, whereupon Crake slits Oryx's throat with a knife. Jimmy then immediately shoots Crake dead.
During Snowman's journey to scavenge supplies, he cuts his foot on a sliver of glass and becomes infected. He returns to the Crakers' camp and learns that three other humans are camping nearby. Snowman follows the smoke to their fire. Snowman is unsure of whether and how to confront them, but makes a decision.

Main characters

Margaret Atwood started writing the novel much earlier than she expected, while still on a book tour for her previous novel, The Blind Assassin. In March 2001, Atwood found herself in the Northern region of Australia, birdwatching with her partner during a break from the book tour. Here, while watching the red-necked crakes in their natural habitat, she was struck with inspiration for the story. However, Atwood explained that the work was also a product of her lingering thoughts on such a scenario throughout her life, as well as spending a great amount of time with scientists throughout her childhood. She stated
Several of my close relatives are scientists, and the main topic at the annual family Christmas dinner is likely to be intestinal parasites or sex hormones in mice, or, when that makes the non-scientists too queasy, the nature of the Universe.

Atwood continued to write the novel through the summer of 2001 while visiting the Arctic North, witnessing global warming's effect on the region. However, shaken by the September 11 attacks, she stopped writing for a few weeks in the autumn, saying, "It's deeply unsettling when you're writing about a fictional catastrophe and then a real one happens". However, with the looming questions of the end, Atwood finished the novel for release in 2003. These questions in Oryx and Crake, Atwood explained, are "simply, What if we continue down the road we're already on? How slippery is the slope? What are our saving graces? Who's got the will to stop us?"

Allusions and references

To other works

The cover of some editions contains a portion of the left panel of Hieronymous Bosch's painting The Garden of Earthly Delights. The cover of other editions contains a modified portion of Lucas Cranach the Elder's painting The Fall.
In the first chapter, Snowman utters a reference from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five:
"It is the strict adherence to daily routine that tends towards the maintenance of good morale and the preservation of sanity," he says out loud. He has the feeling he's quoting from a book, some obsolete, ponderous directive written in aid of European colonials running plantations of one kind or another.

One of Snowman's musings, "Now I'm alone All, all alone. Alone on a wide, wide sea" is an allusion to part four of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
In chapter 5 is "Out, out, brief candle" from Shakespeare's Macbeth.
Crake finds as Hamlet does, that his father was probably killed by his mother and step father. Like Hamlet he plots to avenge him.

To popular culture

In "Margaret Atwood, Transhumanism, and the Singularity", Sobriquet Magazine identified several possible pop cultural references in Oryx and Crake:
the world Atwood imagines in Oryx and Crake is hardly that far-fetched, especially online. The exhibitionistic website At Home With Anna K, for instance, is almost certainly a reference to Ana Voog's AnaCam and the lifecasting movement pioneered by Jennifer Ringley and her now-defunct JenniCam website. Likewise, many of the other fictional websites Jimmy and Crake visit in the novel have real-life analogues: Felicia's Frog Squash is essentially a crush porn portal, the premise of dirtysockpuppets.com recalls ITV's Spitting Image programme, Queek Geek sounds an awful lot like Fear Factor, and the concept of watching assisted suicides on nitee-nite.com was actualized in our world when Craig Ewert allowed his death in Switzerland to be documented by Sky TV for their controversial Right to Die documentary. Even the seemingly far-fetched idea of broadcasting live executions has already been discussed, with a high percentage of the U.S. population receptive to the concept.

To scientific history

The book alludes to green fluorescent protein multiple times in the book. The Children of Crake are described having green eyes from a jellyfish protein, indicating that Crake used this gene in their creation. Green rabbits are wild animals in this world, alluding to Alba, a rabbit created by the scientist Louis-Marie Houdebine with the gfp gene in order to glow green.

Critical reception

The book received mostly favourable reviews in the press. The Globe and Mail, Maclean's, and the Toronto Star ranked the novel high among Atwood's works and Helen Brown, for the Daily Telegraph, wrote "The bioengineered apocalypse she imagines is impeccably researched and sickeningly possible: a direct consequence of short-term science outstripping long-term responsibility. And just like the post-nuclear totalitarian vision of The Handmaid's Tale, this story is set in a society readers will recognise as only a few steps ahead of our own." For The New Yorker, Lorrie Moore called the novel "towering and intrepid". Moore wrote, "Tonally, 'Oryx and Crake' is a roller-coaster ride. The book proceeds from terrifying grimness, through lonely mournfulness, until, midway, a morbid silliness begins sporadically to assert itself, like someone, exhausted by bad news, hysterically succumbing to giggles at a funeral." Joyce Carol Oates noted that the novel is "more ambitious and darkly prophetic" than The Handmaid's Tale. Oates called the work an "ambitiously concerned, skillfully executed performance".
Joan Smith, writing for The Observer, faulted the novel's uneven construction and lack of emotional depth. She concluded: "In the end, Oryx and Crake is a parable, an imaginative text for the anti-globalisation movement that does not quite work as a novel."
In a review of The Year of the Flood, Ursula K. Le Guin defended the novel against criticism of its characters by suggesting the novel experiments with components of morality plays.
On November 5, 2019, the BBC News listed Oryx and Crake on its list of the 100 most influential novels.

Sequels

The Year of the Flood was released on 7 September 2009 in the United Kingdom, and 22 September 2009 in Canada and the United States. Though chronicling a different set of characters, the follow-up expands upon and clarifies the relationships of Crake with Oryx and Jimmy with his high school girlfriend Ren. Glenn makes a brief appearance. It also identifies the three characters introduced at the end of the original, and finishes the cliffhanger ending.
The third book in the series, MaddAddam, was published in August 2013.

TV adaptation

's company Protozoa Pictures were developing a television adaptation of the entire trilogy, under the working title MaddAddam. Aronofsky was to serve as executive producer and possibly director, with the script written by playwright Eliza Clark.
The project was formerly being developed for HBO; in 2016 Aronofsky said that the network was no longer attached, but confirmed that the scripts were written and the project was still underway.
In January 2018, Paramount Television and Anonymous Content announced they had won the bidding war for rights to Atwood's MaddAddam book trilogy and plan to bring the series to cable or video on demand. No network has yet agreed to carry the series.