Margaret Atwood has resisted applying the “science fiction” label to those novels of hers taking place in dystopian futures, preferring instead the term “speculative fiction.” So I wonder what she would think of the way GoodReads classifies Oryx and Crake because as soon as I indicated I was done with the novel, a window popped up asking me if I’d like to recommend Oryx and Crake to various of my GoodReads friends because of their supposed interest in “fantasy.” And I had to stop and scratch my chin and wonder for a second, “Did I just finish a fantasy novel there?” because “fantasy” Oryx and Crake decidedly is not, even if the title might elicit images of dragons or trolls or whatever in the mind of an uninformed reader just beginning the book.Along those lines, the narrator Snowman, once Jimmy, says, “It was one of Crake’s rules that no names could be chosen for which a physical equivalent—even stuffed, even skeletal—could not be demonstrated. No unicorns, no griffins, no manticores, or basilisks.”And right there is interestingly the difference between “science fiction” and “speculative fiction,” according to Atwood. In an article for The Guardian, she writes, “What I mean by ‘science fiction’ is those books that descend from HG Wells's The War of the Worlds, which treats of an invasion by tentacled Martians shot to Earth in metal canisters – things that could not possibly happen – whereas, for me, ‘speculative fiction’ means plots that descend from Jules Verne's books about submarines and balloon travel and such – things that really could happen but just hadn't completely happened when the authors wrote the books.”So, no dragons or orcs in Oryx and Crake, no creating new worlds out of chaos, just working with an already created world with a “physical equivalent,” which we know too well. The title names are no mythological beings or fantastic creatures; instead, they are two extinct “bioforms” whose names have been adopted by the two other principal characters in the novel, and who along with Snowman play a large role in the extinction event of homo sapiens sapiens. And that, I suppose, is a thing “that really could happen but just hadn’t happened” when Atwood wrote this interesting, fast-paced book of “speculative fiction.” And thankfully still hasn’t happened over the past decade since its publication. But what has happened increasingly over these last ten years are tremendous advances in genetic engineering and equally tremendous concerns about genetically modified organisms, as seen in the recent global protests against Monsanto less than a month ago. Just a quick google of “genetic engineering” will provide articles from a week ago detailing how scientists have managed to tweak the genetic structure of a certain type of mosquito so that it can no longer smell humans.And it’s advances like that mosquito which lay the foundation for the brave new world of Oryx and Crake with its pigoons and rakunks and spoat/giders among other genetic “splices,” along with genetically engineered scientific developments in Nooskins and BlyssPluss, just to name a couple. Little Jimmy lives in a Compound run by OrganInc Farms, in a world run by an elite meritocracy peopled by geneticists and other geniuses. Regular people like you and me (NTs or neuraltypicals) live in the pleeblands, which are a lot dirtier, less hi-tech, and filled with germs and other microbes that are kept out of the sealed and guarded Compounds. When little Jimmy asks for a cat, he’s told no because it might “carry diseases that would be bad for the pigoons” that his father works with at OrganInc.“So what’s a pigoon?” you ask. Well, its technical name is sus multiorganifer and if that doesn’t make it any clearer, try this: “The goal of the pigoon project was to grow an assortment of foolproof human-tissue organs in a transgenic knockout pig host—organs that would transplant smoothly and avoid rejection.” Jimmy’s father is an architect of the pigoon project and currently is working on “perfecting a pigoon that could grow five or six kidneys at a time. Such a host animal could be reaped of its extra kidneys; then, rather than being destroyed, it could keep on living and grow more organs much as a lobster could grow another claw to replace a missing one.”If that sounds a tad disturbing, then wait till you get to the part of the book where Jimmy goes to visit his childhood friend Crake who is now studying at Watson Crick, the top institute now that Harvard is underwater. While on a tour of the Watson-Crick NeoAgricultural labs, Jimmy sees “a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing.” What Jimmy is seeing is chicken being grown (cultured?) in a lab like “an animal protein tuber.” In fact “chicken” would be a misnomer here, because it’s really only the breasts which are growing in the lab with an orifice in the middle of the organism where nutrients are deposited. The rest of the creature and any unnecessary functions besides growth have been eliminated. “ChickieNobs, they’re thinking of calling the stuff,” Crake tells Jimmy. “They’ve already got the takeout franchise operation in place…Investors are lining up around the block.”And if that sounds horrific, it is, and that’s what Atwood is going for here, much like what Mary Shelley was doing two hundred years ago, but instead of Victor Frankenstein sewing together parts from corpses and reanimating his work with electricity, Atwood’s characters play god by splicing genetic materials to create their own hybrid monstrosities.“Hybrid” is a good word to use here in a review of a book that is not only chock full of wolvogs, snats and spoat/giders, but which is also chock full of hybrid neologisms created by the author: Rockulators, JigScape, Extinctathon, many of them grimly humorous brand names (and Atwood is second only to George Saunders when it comes to inventing awful but clever brand names). But Oryx and Crake itself is a hybrid of sorts, and I’m not talking about the concept of “speculative fiction” again. The book reads fast; I finished it in three days and at times it almost has the feel of a young adult novel (not helped by the quasi-YA packaging of the edition I read). When I started it, I wondered if maybe in fact Atwood were trying her hand at YA with this novel, much like Joyce Carol Oates or Francine Prose both have. But after a few chapters I decided there’s just way too much kiddie porn and other potentially objectionable content in the book for it to fly in the not-so-rare air of Young Adult fiction.At the same time, as easy and quick as it reads and despite its young protagonist (at least in many of the chapters in the “once upon a time” sections of the novel), Oryx and Crake plays with ideas that go so far beyond anything in a YA novel that it makes my head spin. The novel opens with a quote from Jonathan Swift and another from Virginia Woolf. Frankenstein is obvious here, but there’s also Shakespeare, and Blake and Pope and Coleridge, and no doubt many many more that I haven’t even begun to wrap my head around. Like in Cat’s Eye, Atwood plays with ideas of Time here and does some interesting things with Snowman in the timeless present and Jimmy back in time. Atwood connects to both ends of the Bible, mixing Genesis and Exodus together with Revelations, and then tossing it all together with myth and even Platonic (neo-Platonic?) ideas. Snowman is a prophet of sorts, that’s clear, and I’m fascinated by the golden calf moment in the book. But he also seems to be the demiurge. And if so, what in the world is Atwood doing with these ideas? Quick honest answer: I don’t know yet, but like the other Atwood I have read, this novel will take another read or two for me to pull the strands together and begin to fully appreciate the big ideas at work here beneath the surface of this deceptively easy read.++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Here’s a link to the article from The Guardian (October 14, 2011) I referred to:http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/...In the article, Atwood promotes another neologism (“ustopia”) to describe her novel, a splicing that seems appropriate for the world of Oryx and Crake, and one that thankfully hasn’t caught on and I’m hoping never will.And in case you like the moniker sci-fi just fine, here’s another great article from The Guardian a couple of years back where contemporary sci-fi authors pick their favorite work in the genre:http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/...Atwood picks Fahrenheit 451.++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Here's my review of The Year of the Flood:http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
I started this book knowing that this is a post-apocalyptic novel. I knew that Snowman had survived some sort of mass destruction of mankind because of an experiment gone awry and is fighting for survival. The story started with Snowman sleeping in a tree, waking up in a survival mode, with the last of his provisions. He then observes the children at a distance, obviously not surprised or afraid of them. They knew him as they approached him and chanted his name, “Snowman, oh Snowman.” Who are these children? They questioned him about found items that most of us would know, a hubcap, a computer mouse, his beard that they call “moss”, etc. I wondered about the children and why they're so innocent of things we take for granted in this world. I’m thinking that the children must have been babies when the apocalypse happened. But wait, I read that it's only been 2-3 mos. since the apocalypse. Then peculiar descriptions of the children began, such as skin resistant to ultra-violet light, each perfect, each a different skin color, but all with green eyes. And then there’s this Crake that Snowman kept on referring back to as the maker of rules, as the one he has to go to for answers. Snowman makes a pretend gesture with his broken watch as if receiving signals from Crake for answers, to satisfy the children’s questions. Then Oryx comes into the picture. Snowman talks to her, a pretend entity. The tale alternates between Snowman, a name from when Jimmy jokingly references himself as The Abominable Snowman to the Crakers, as he survives his post-apocalyptic world and his past.The story flashes to Snowman’s memory of his childhood. His name was Jimmy then. He was raised in a dystopian society in which genetic engineering was encouraged for economic success and supersedes over any moral qualms. This was because mankind has depleted their natural resources and ruined the environment. His father worked at OrganInc Farms, a genographer who was one of the chief architects of the Pigoon project. The pigoons were meant to be hosts to organs that could be easily transplanted to humans to avoid rejection, a reference to our current experimentations such as the Vacanti mouse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacanti_... - which has a human ear grown on its back and meant to avoid rejection upon transplantation. In this dystopian world, the architects of genetic engineering were the top dogs as they were encouraged to do whatever needs to be done to make life better for the humans. His family lives in luxury within the Compounds, built by biotech companies for their employees. They live among the high IQ genetic engineering elites and their children. The Compounds are protected by CorpSeCorps, keeping out the pleeblands, the less intelligent and talented humans who are left to live in the ruins of mankind’s waste, the desperate consumer of products created by the elites. In this world, the biotech companies rule because they provide what mankind desperately wants, genetically engineered food to replace naturally-created food that is no longer viable, feel-good drugs as relief from an increasing nightmarish world of depleting resources and crime, and products that enhances looks and sexual desire.Jimmy befriends Glenn, who later becomes known as Crake. Glenn’s nickname is from his codename Crake on an online game called Extinctathon, a trivia game in which they name the extinct species of animals and plant life. The genius Crake is the ultimate rational overcoming any human empathy he may have, the premier reflection of their society’s treasuring of the mental elite and devaluing of arts and the humanities. Jimmy and Crake spent many teenage bonding hours together traversing the internet and playing games that reflect their world of cheap life and instant gratification of violence and sex. They played violent games like Three-Dimensional Waco, Barbarian Stomp, and Kwiktime Osama. Crake is an expert at side maneuvers, where you not only have to see where you’re going, but you have to see where your opponent is going. They visited voyeur websites such as nitee-nite.com, for viewing people committing assisted suicide, and various porn sites. It is at one of these sites, HottTotts, that they first encountered Oryx, an approximately 8 year old child from a southeast Asian country who was sold into child sex slavery and forced to perform porn acts. Her haunted eyes seemed to stare at Jimmy, the guilty voyeur, the distant participant to her slavery. He kept a print out of her because she touched his humanity, the part that made him feel guilty for the first time at the things he was doing.Crake later became an elite researcher and saved Jimmy from a life of working in a monotonous low-level job. When Jimmy came to work for Crake as the marketing man, Crake revealed to him that he was working with human embryos, to create a race of humans with what he considers harmful qualities removed. They are all of different shades of multi-colored skin to avoid racism. They are placid and has no need for hierarchy or territoriality. They have cyclical and plural sexuality, and mating rituals to promote reproduction-only in order to avoid sexual frustrations, rape and jealousy. They are meant to be a religion-free, placid race. It was also while working for Crake that he encountered the adult Oryx, who was working to help the Crakers adapt to the world and who was also Crake’s whore, purely to satisfy his sexual frustration. Then there came a triangle of Jimmy’s friendship with Crake and Jimmy’s deep love for Oryx. Ultimately, Crake, an expert at side maneuvers in online games, pulled a side maneuver on the society he detested, to leave Jimmy alone in the world to be guardian over his genetically engineered children.The three main characters have symbolic meanings. Crake, with his hierarchy, logic, and anti-art, represents the masculine or yang quality. Oryx, with her forgiveness and adaptability, represents the female or yin quality. Finally, Jimmy represents the balance of the male and female, the aggression and the bending, the yin and the yang. Crake’s blaming of sexual frustration on the ills of society reflects the historical masculine point of view that women, considered the instigator of sexual feelings from men, are the root of evil. This results in traditions that have caused evils to be done to women because they were blamed for inciting men’s lust. Oryx was the all-suffering yet forgiving female. She was the total placid female made to cater to the male sexual desire. Through all this, she sees good in all and adjusts amazingly to her situations. She, therefore, can see any situation from a forgiving, loving and kind perspective. Snowman (Jimmy), the blending of the yin and yang, the flawed humanity, was selected to lead the new “perfect” race to safety. Jimmy’s humanity lies in his imperfect yet resilient qualities. Snowman is a terrific every man character. We can relate to him because he is realistic in his discomfort and ruminations, yet there is a hidden strength which enables him to survive. He is vulnerable and yet strong at the same time. We've all had times where we feel we can't go on, but we do, anyway. For all his flaws, it is Jimmy that Crake chose to lead and protect the children of Crake. Jimmy, being whimsical, ironically turned Crake into a godlike being. He also became somewhat like a shaman, using the whimsical term "feathers" to describe his hairy chest instead of the scientific name. He often lets his imagination runs away with him as he tells stories of Oryx and Crake, and explains things to the Crakers.In the end, the elitist, hierarchical, “masculine” society that was destined for destruction was saved by their product, humans who inhabit mostly “female” qualities of placidity and non-hierarchal tribal community, and who, in the end, became religious.
What do You think about Oryx And Crake (2004)?
I wanted to give myself three months to reflect on this book before writing anything about it. I have a tendency, upon finishing a novel that I really, really love, to annoy the shit out of friends and loved ones by first trying to impress upon them the need to read this book now, NOW - and failing that, to wax hyperbolic and ecstatic over its charms. To them I am the litboy who cried wolf.And yes, it has only been two months, not three, but I've read the other two books in the MaddAddam series (which pale to this work) - and on a sunny, warm Saturday in San Francisco when everything feels pretty great, my mind wandered back again to Oryx and Crake and remember how easy it would be for humanity to screw all this up, irrevocably.Atwood refers to this novel as speculative fiction - not dystopian, urban fantasy, etc. - as the world she created is the late 21st century harvest of seeds in the ground today. The story is horrifying, sobering, real. Her characters are relatable, their struggles are our own, and the outcomes of their decisions have the unintended consequences that our own do.I know I will return to this book again in 10 or 20 years. I want to see and feel what that world is then through the filters of this book that presages all of those things about our species that have the potential of going really, horribly wrong. I remember reading something that Carl Sagan posited in his wonderful book Cosmos - about how sentient beings that become technologically advanced have a very slim chance of living through their adolescence. Our brains contain too much ability to envision a Doomsday scenario - and then the werewithal to trigger it. Atwood writes brilliantly of one potential scenario.
—Brian
Clever, thought provoking writing that raises the question of what it means to be human. Through the eyes of the main protagonist, Jimmy, AKA “Snowman,” we are introduced to a post apocalyptic future where humanity has been wiped out, except for “Snowman” and the “Children of Crake,” ie re-engineered humans – if they can be called human. Who Crake is and who Snowman is, and what happened to the world is left to the reader to piece together as we go back into Jimmy’s past to a world before the fall of the human race.Before the fall, the world is descending into chaos as population growth outstrips food supply and Corporations compete to capitalize on increased demand for "goods" through advances in bioengineering. Both food and organs are grown in biological farms. Companies seek an edge over each other by engaging in bio terrorism. Nasty biological agents capable of turning a human being into soup in minutes are being played with. Safety procedures are developed, not to protect humans from being infected, but to protect the corporations’ patented biological products.Humanity is divided into the "haves" and "have nots" as companies occupy the safe and affluent “Compounds” while everyone else is left in the chaos that is the “Pleeblands.” Life is cheap. Children are considered commodities to be exploited and sold and we hear some of their stories, told with a casual callousness that is at once heart breaking and confronting.The most chilling aspect of this book is that the culture and attitudes presented are not that far removed from where we are today. Particularly in the West, we pay lip service to child protection, and yet at the same time we are a major consumer of child porn and child exploitation. Even within the boundaries of legality, children are still becoming increasingly sexualized in advertising, and in our pageants and even some politicians are pushing for the legal age of consent to be dropped.Why then should we expect these children – the next generation of politicians, scientists, corporate decision makers – why should we expect they will make moral ethical decisions when it comes to scientific fields like genetics, cloning, or biological warfare?And where does it end? This book takes a look at one possible ending. If we had the science to re-engineer human beings, how long before we would justify crossing that ethical boundary? One generation? Two?In this book we get a closeup, and often uncomfortable look at the human condition as Atwood rides current attitudes in science and modern western culture through to their ultimate logical post apocalyptic conclusion.Engaging reading. 4 stars
—David Sven
This is the second dystopia Atwood has written, and I think it's less successful than The Handmaid's Tale. Her vision here is of a not-too-distant future in which the US is divided into corporate-owned gated communities where the (biotech) companies' owners and highly-paid skilled workforce live and the lawless, sprawling urban wasteland where everyone else lives. Unlike virtually every other Atwood book I know of, the two main characters are male. The narrator, Jimmy, and his childhood friend C
—Lindsay
