Oryx and Crake

Margaret Atwood

4 ideas

1. BlyssPluss pill conceals an extinction plague

   Crake, a prodigy at a biotech corporation, markets BlyssPluss, a pill promising boosted libido, disease protection and prolonged youth, and secretly loads it with a timed hemorrhagic virus (JUVE) that kills almost all of humanity within weeks of global release. He has already built the Crakers, an engineered replacement species, in a sealed dome called Paradice. He pre-vaccinates his friend Jimmy so someone survives to lead them out, then cuts Oryx's throat in front of Jimmy, who shoots him. Jimmy becomes 'Snowman,' the apparent last human, shepherding the Crakers.

2. Crakers: humans engineered without conflict sources

   Crake designs a post-human species by deleting the traits he blames for human destruction: the Crakers are herbivores, mate only in heat signaled by blue coloration so there is no jealousy or sexual rejection, have no hierarchy or race, repel insects with citrus-scented skin, and die painlessly at thirty. He also tries to remove the brain's capacity for symbolic thought and worship. It fails: from Snowman's improvised stories they build a mythology of 'Crake' as creator and make an effigy of Snowman, so religion and art re-emerge from the storytelling impulse itself.

3. Profit-driven biotech manufactures the diseases it cures

   When pharmaceutical corporations profit from treatment, they gain an incentive to create demand for it. In the novel, HelthWyzer seeds new diseases through its own vitamin pills and sells the antidotes, while corporate compounds wall off an engineered elite, backed by private CorpSeCorps security, from the lawless 'pleeblands' that serve as their market and test population. Once a firm controls both the disease and the cure, public health becomes a revenue stream.

4. Numbers people versus words people

   The novel's society is split between 'numbers people,' whose scientific skills are richly rewarded, and 'words people,' whose humanistic skills survive only as advertising copy at decaying arts schools. A culture that values only what can be engineered loses the ability to judge whether it should be engineered. Jimmy's habit of hoarding obsolete words acts out that loss, since vocabulary for moral nuance disappears along with the institutions that kept it.

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