Week 13: Literary Speculation

“Oryx and Crake”

Margaret Atwood

This week I read Oryx and Crake, a novel that isn’t quite science fiction since it goes beyond realism presented in the novel itself. Snowman, a post-apocalyptic character who once was Jimmy, lives near a group of human-like creatures whom he calls Crakers. Throughout the story, it tells you the story of Jimmy’s past and how he had ended up with the Crakers as well as with a different name. Jimmy’s past was quite interesting as he met Glenn whom he refers as Crake. They both were smart, but somewhat messed up since they enjoyed watching underground videos including child pornography. 

As I read this book, I couldn’t take a liking to either Jimmy or Crake due to their weird interests and their personalities. At some point of the story Crake begins to create the Crakers, peaceful, herbivorous humanoids who only have sexual intercourse during limited breeding seasons and to get some helpers in working on his creation, he hires Jimmy and Oryx, a girl who appeared in the pornography they watched before. Crakers weren’t the only things Crake was working on, but also BlyssPluss, a super-pill that promises health and happiness, which ended up wiping out the human race. To this point of the book I’ve believed that maybe Crake wasn’t that bad and felt some sympathy for having such cruel thing happen to the world, but this was something Crake had planned all along. 

The characters in this story played with me a lot since at some point I simply disliked the character’s personalities and at some point I felt sympathy, but that all went to waste by the end. I also have mixed feelings toward Jimmy since he started off as a ‘brat’, but later knew what Crake had done was simply terrible. He had already had the mind of killing Crake, but confirmed it once Crake had slit Oryx’s throat (since he was in love with her). I personally think that Jimmy is a better person than Crake since although he could have abandoned Crake’s creations, he still became the Crakers’ teacher and took care of them. Although he may be better than Crake, I still can’t take a liking of this character for some reason. 

This book is written so smoothly from a modern time period to the result and there isn’t a sudden jump to the future that it is hard to decide whether this book falls under the genre of science fiction or not. The author does describe this novel as ’speculative fiction’ and ‘adventure romance’ rather than science fiction and I do get the reason why she describes it such way. It was very interesting to read this novel since it includes the science aspect of reality in creating a new type of humanoids. The reality aspect of the story still continues since by the very end Snowman finds other true humans whom he wonders if he should befriend them or not. This explains that there still are some true humans out there alive in this post apocalyptic time period.