Oryx and Crake
Margaret Atwood (2003)
“A satire of corporate science run amok, told by the last human on Earth — a man who loved the genius who destroyed everything.”
At a Glance
Snowman — formerly Jimmy — appears to be the last natural human alive, living in a tree beside a colony of genetically engineered post-humans called the Crakers. Through alternating flashbacks, we learn how his brilliant, sociopathic best friend Crake designed a plague disguised as a sexual enhancement pill called BlyssPluss, exterminating the human species while releasing his 'perfect' replacement race. The mysterious Oryx, whom both men loved, distributed the pill worldwide. Jimmy was left alive as the Crakers' guardian. The novel ends with Jimmy discovering three human survivors and facing an impossible choice.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
The first volume of Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy — followed by The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013) — Oryx and Crake was immediately recognized as a major work of speculative fiction that brought literary prestige to genre themes. It predicted with uncomfortable accuracy: corporate-dominated governance, pharmaceutical culture, genetic engineering controversies, pandemic vulnerability, the degradation of humanities education, and internet atrocity tourism. The novel's 2003 publication date, coinciding with both the Human Genome Project's completion and the SARS outbreak, gave it an almost prophetic quality that only intensified during COVID-19.
Diction Profile
Formal narration with heavy satirical overlay — corporate jargon embedded in literary prose, Latinate vocabulary in Snowman's consciousness dissolving into fragments
Moderate