Oryx and Crake is a 2003 novel by Canadian authorMargaret Atwood. She has described the novel as speculative fiction and adventureromance, rather than pure science fiction, because it does not deal with things "we can't yet do or begin to do",[1] yet goes beyond the amount of realism she associates with the novel form.[2] 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 novel focuses on a character called "Snowman", living in a post-apocalyptic world near a small group of primitive and innocent 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 that built privileged walled compounds to isolate and protect their employees and the employees' families from a degenerating outside society. The companies had operated by developing and marketing advanced technology products such as medical treatments and genetically engineered hybrid animals, but now no other humans are evident, and the compounds have become decaying ruins.
Near starvation, Snowman decides to return to the ruins of a compound named RejoovenEsense to search for supplies, even though his excursion risks encountering dangers including feral populations of the hybridized 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.[4][5][6] During one of their child pornography viewings, Jimmy is very much lovestruck and horrified by the gazing eyes of a young girl seen in the porn known as Hott Tott.
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 notices a human in the Craker habitat and thinks he recognizes her as the girl from the pornographic video. Seemingly 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 or has known all along. 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 breaks out and begins wiping out the human race and causing mass chaos outside of the protected Rejoov compound. Realizing that the pandemic had been deliberately introduced by Crake and was distributed by including it within BlyssPluss, and sensing further immediate danger, Jimmy grabs a gun and goes 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 encounters aggressive hybrid animals and retreats into the RejoovenEsense compound. He finds some indications that other humans have survived– seeing smoke on the horizon near the compound and briefly hearing voices on radio receivers in the compound. He carelessly breaks a scavenged bourbon bottle after binge drinking its content, and cuts his foot on a sliver of the glass. The cut becomes infected. His treatment of the wound with the medications he can find has some initial success, but the infection later gets worse again. He returns to the Crakers' camp and learns that three other humans have recently encountered the Crakers and are camping nearby. Snowman follows the smoke to where they are gathered around a campfire. Snowman is unsure of what to do, and considers killing them. Whether he kills them, introduces himself or quietly flees, and whatever happens afterwards, is left open to question at the end of the book.
Main characters
Snowman, whose original name is Jimmy, is the main protagonist; the story is told from his perspective. The name "Snowman" is short for "abominable Snowman", a reference to the Yeti, a mythical ape-like creature of the Himalaya. For the online-game Extinctathon, Jimmy temporarily also has the animal code name "Thickney" (bush thick-knee or bush stone-curlew, Burhinus grallarius), which Crake chooses for Jimmy from an Australian bird known for inhabiting cemeteries (p.81).
Crake, whose original name is Glenn, is Jimmy's childhood friend; an excellent student in high school, he becomes a brilliant geneticist and eventual mad scientist. He devises a plan to rid the Earth of Homo sapiens and replace this destructive, poorly designed species with a more peaceful and environmentally friendly version. His player-name in Extinctathon is from the red-necked crake, a small Australian bird. In Robin Elliott's essay on Atwood, he explains the parallels between Glenn and the famous pianist Glenn Gould: the novel states that Glenn is named after a famous pianist, and Atwood has explained that Glenn has Asperger syndrome, which Gould is suspected to have also had.[7][8]
Oryx is a mysterious woman, recognized by Jimmy and Crake as the waif-like girl from a child pornography site. Crake hires her for sexual services and as a teacher to the Crakers, but she secretly becomes Jimmy's lover as well. After the catastrophe, her memory continues to haunt Snowman. Her name is from the oryx, an Africanantelope: "It's not even her real name, which he'd never known anyway; it's only a word. It's a mantra" (p.110). She is described as likely originating from the South or South-East Asian region.
Sharon is Jimmy's mother. She once worked at OrganInc, like her husband, but stopped due to an untreated nervous breakdown related to her opposition to the bio-corporations' business. She is depressed and often fights with Jimmy's father. Jimmy vies for his mother's attention, but she spends much of her time sitting in her bathrobe and smoking. Eventually, Sharon runs away from the HelthWyzer compound, abandoning her son and taking his treasured genetically engineered pet rakunk [a genetic splice between a raccoon and a skunk] named "Killer". She takes up with various underground opposition groups and is hunted by the deadly CorpSeCorps corporate security services. Jimmy is haunted by his mother's absence and is visited often by CorpSeCorps inspectors attempting to track her whereabouts.
Jimmy's father, unnamed in the book, works first for OrganInc and later for HelthWyzer as a scientist. He is heavily involved in the development of pigoons (genetically engineered pigs that produce organs for human transplants). He is more pragmatic about the morality of genetic splicing than his wife. After Jimmy's mother deserts the compound, he pursues a relationship with his laboratory technician, Ramona, and they eventually marry.
Ramona is one of Jimmy's father's lab technicians at OrganInc. Ramona, Jimmy, and Jimmy's father frequently go out to eat together. When Jimmy's father leaves OrganInc to accept a new position at HelthWyzer, Ramona makes the move with him. After Jimmy's mother's mysterious departure, Ramona moves in and takes on a motherly role in Jimmy's life.
Beginnings
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.[9]
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".[9] 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?"[9][10]
The French translation of the title to "Le dernier homme" (The Last Man) is an allusion to Mary Shelley's work of the same name, both set in the apocalyptic genre as a plague results in the near-extinction of humanity.
"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.
In chapter 5 (subsection "Bottle") 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 scientific history
The book alludes to green fluorescent protein multiple times. 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.[13]
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."[15] 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."[16]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".[17]
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."[18]
Darren Aronofsky's company Protozoa Pictures were developing a television adaptation of the entire MaddAddam trilogy, under the working title MaddAddam. Aronofsky was to serve as executive producer and possibly director, with the script written by playwright Eliza Clark.[22][23] The project was formerly being developed for HBO; in 2016 Aronofsky said that the network was no longer attached,[22][23][24] but confirmed that the scripts were written and the project was still underway.[23] In January 2018, Paramount Television and Anonymous Content announced they had won the bidding war for rights to the trilogy and planned to bring the series to cable or video on demand. No network had yet agreed to carry the series.[25][24]
Censorship in the United States
Oryx and Crake is one of the most-banned books by school officials in the United States.[26] In 2023, it was banned from school libraries by the school boards of Willard, Missouri and Hanover County, Virginia.[27][28] That same year, the Beaufort County, South Carolina school district banned the book but then reversed the decision and returned it to high school library shelves.[29] Officials in Forsyth County, Georgia did not ban Oryx and Crake but did decide to require parental permission before a student could access it.[30] In April 2024, it was banned in three large Texas school districts. [31]
In August 2024, it was one of 13 books banned statewide by Utah's state board of education, allegedly for its "objective sensitive material."[32][33]
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.[34]
↑ Sharon Rose Wilson, Myths and fairy tales in contemporary women's fiction: From Atwood to Morrison, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, ISBN0-230-60554-0, pp. 43, 49.
↑ Elliott, Robin (Summer 2006). "Margaret Atwood and Music". University of Toronto Quarterly. 75 (3): 821–832. doi:10.3138/utq.75.3.821.
↑ Atwood conceived of Oryx and Crake on a birding expedition in Australia (Atwood, 2004: 517).
Margaret Eleanor Atwood is a Canadian novelist, poet, and literary critic. Since 1961, she has published 18 books of poetry, 18 novels, 11 books of nonfiction, nine collections of short fiction, eight children's books, two graphic novels, and a number of small press editions of both poetry and fiction. Her best-known work is the 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood has won numerous awards and honors for her writing, including two Booker Prizes, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Governor General's Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, Princess of Asturias Awards, and the National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards. A number of her works have been adapted for film and television.
The Handmaid's Tale is a futuristic dystopian novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood published in 1985. It is set in a near-future New England in a patriarchal, totalitarian theonomic state known as the Republic of Gilead, which has overthrown the United States government. Offred is the central character and narrator and one of the "Handmaids": women who are forcibly assigned to produce children for the "Commanders", who are the ruling class in Gilead.
The Blind Assassin is a novel by the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. It was first published by McClelland and Stewart in 2000. The book is set in the fictional Ontario town of Port Ticonderoga and in Toronto. It is narrated from the present day, referring to previous events that span the twentieth century but mostly the 1930s and 1940s. It is a work of historical fiction with the major events of Canadian history forming an important backdrop, for example, the On-to-Ottawa Trek and a 1934 Communist rally at Maple Leaf Gardens. Greater verisimilitude is given by a series of newspaper articles commenting on events and on the novel's characters from a distance.
A handmaiden is a personal maid or female servant. Depending on culture or historical period, a handmaiden may be of enslaved status or may be simply an employee. The terms handmaiden and handmaid are synonyms.
The Handmaid's Tale is a 1990 dystopian film adapted from Canadian author Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel of the same name. Directed by Volker Schlöndorff, the film stars Natasha Richardson (Offred), Faye Dunaway, Robert Duvall, Aidan Quinn (Nick), and Elizabeth McGovern (Moira). The screenplay was written by playwright Harold Pinter. The original music score was composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto. The film was entered into the 40th Berlin International Film Festival. It is the first filmed adaptation of the novel, succeeded by the Hulu television series which began streaming in 2017.
A snowman is a temporary sculpture made of snow. Snowman or snowmen may also refer to:
Shannon E. Hengen is a literary critic and professor of Canadian and women's literature at Laurentian University, Ontario, Canada where she formerly served as chairperson for the Department of English. Her specialities include dramatic comedy, aboriginal theatre, contemporary feminist writing, and Margaret Atwood. The theory that most informs her work involves performance, carnival, and gender. The aspect of literary style that most concerns her is voice, and the theme that most intrigues her at present is marriage. She has written or edited numerous books.
Abominable Snowman is a common name for the Yeti, an apelike animal cryptid said to inhabit the Himalaya region of Nepal and Tibet.
Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth is a non-fiction book written by Margaret Atwood, about the nature of debt, for the 2008 Massey Lectures. Each of the book's five chapters was delivered as a one-hour lecture in a different Canadian city, beginning in St. John's, Newfoundland, on October 12 and ending in Toronto on November 1. The lectures were broadcast on CBC Radio One's Ideas November 10–14. The book was published by House of Anansi Press, both in paperback and in a limited edition hardcover.
The Year of the Flood is a novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, the second book of her dystopian trilogy, released on September 22, 2009, in Canada and the United States, and on September 7, 2009, in the United Kingdom. The novel was mentioned in numerous newspaper review articles looking forward to notable fiction of 2009.
Climate fiction is literature that deals with climate change. Generally speculative in nature but inspired by climate science, works of climate fiction may take place in the world as we know it, in the near future, or in fictional worlds experiencing climate change. The genre frequently includes science fiction and dystopian or utopian themes, imagining the potential futures based on how humanity responds to the impacts of climate change. Climate fiction typically involves anthropogenic climate change and other environmental issues as opposed to weather and disaster more generally. Technologies such as climate engineering or climate adaptation practices often feature prominently in works exploring their impacts on society.
MaddAddam is a novel by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, published on 29 August 2013.
Orville Stoeber is an American singer/songwriter, actor and artist.
The Power is a 2016 science fiction novel by the British writer Naomi Alderman. Its central premise is of women developing the ability to release electrical jolts from their fingers, which allows them to become the dominant sex. In 2017, it won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.
The Testaments is a 2019 novel by Margaret Atwood. It is the sequel to The Handmaid's Tale (1985). The novel is set 15 years after the events of The Handmaid's Tale. It is narrated by Aunt Lydia, a character from the previous novel; Agnes, a young woman living in Gilead; and Daisy, a young woman living in Canada.
A climate apocalypse is a term used to denote a predicted scenario involving the global collapse of human civilization due to climate change. Such collapse could theoretically arrive through a set of interrelated concurrent factors such as famine, extreme weather, war and conflict, and disease. There are many similar terms in use such as climate dystopia, collapse, endgame, and catastrophe.
Syima Aslam Hon. FRSL is the CEO, Artistic Director and Founder of the Bradford Literature Festival.
Ecofeminism generally is based on the understanding that gender as a concept is the basis of the human-environment relationships. Studies suggest that there is a difference between men and women when it comes to how they treat nature, for instance, women are known to be more involved with environmentally friendly behaviors. Socially there is an important claim in the ecofeminism theoretical framework that the patriarchy is linked to discrimination against women and the degradation of the environment. In Canada the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Toxics in 2020 shows that ineffective environmental management and mismanagement of hazardous waste is affecting different age groups, genders, and socioeconomic status in different ways, while three years before that, Canadian Human Rights Commission in 2017 submitted another report, warning the government about how the exposure to environmental hazards is a different experience for minorities in Canada. There have been ecofeminist movements for decades all over Canada such as Mother's Milk Project, protests against Uranium mining in Nova Scotia, and the Clayoquot Sound Peace Camp. Ecofeminism has also appeared as a concept in the media, such as books, publications, movies, and documentaries such as the MaddAddam trilogy by Margaret Atwood and Fury for the Sound: the women at Clayoquot by Shelley Wine. Ecofeminism in the Canadian context has been subject to criticism, especially by the Indigenous communities as they call it cultural appropriation, non-inclusive, and inherent in colonial worldviews and structures.
Daniela Kerck is a German scenic designer and stage director who has worked internationally. She directed and created the stage for Jörg Widmann's opera Babylon that opened the 2022 Internationale Maifestspiele Wiesbaden in 2022, and again for Puccini's Turandot for the 2024 festival. Her staging of the world premiere of Søren Nils Eichberg's Oryx and Crake was nominated for the 2023 International Opera Awards.
References
Adami, Valentina. "Bioethics through Literature: Margaret Atwood's Cautionary Tales". WVR, 2011.
Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. McClelland and Stewart, 2003.
Atwood, Margaret. "The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake in Context". PMLA 119, 2004.
Howells, Coral Ann. "Margaret Atwood's Dystopian Visions: The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake". In Coral Ann Howells (Ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood (161–75). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 161–75. ISBN978-0-521-83966-2 (hardback) ISBN0-521-83966-1 (hardback) ISBN978-0-521-54851-9 (pbk.) ISBN0-521-54851-9 (pbk.)
Ingersoll, Earl G. "Survival in Margaret Atwood's Novel Oryx and Crake". Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 45.2 (2004): 162–175.
Machat, Sibylle. In the Ruins of Civilizations: Narrative Structures, World Constructions and Physical Realities in the Post-Apocalyptic Novel. WVT, Trier, 2013. ISBN978-3-86821-431-4 (pbk.)
Mohr, Dunja M. "Transgressive Utopian Dystopias: The Postmodern Reappearance of Utopia in the Disguise of Dystopia". Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 55.1 (2007): 5-24. [Oryx and Crake]
Mundler, Helen E. "Heritage, Pseudo-Heritage and Survival in a Spurious Wor(L)D: Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood". Commonwealth Essays and Studies 27(1), 89–98, 2004.
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