In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [38]
The designer people have some accessories I wouldn’t mind having myself: built-in insect repellant, automatic sunblock, and the ability to digest leaves, like rabbits. They also have several traits that would indeed be improvements of a sort, though many of us wouldn’t like them. For instance, mating is seasonal: in season, certain parts of the body turn blue, as with baboons, so there is no more romantic rejection or date rape. And these people can’t read, so a lot of harmful ideologies will never trouble them.
There are other genetically engineered creatures in the book as well: Chickie Nobs, for instance, which are chicken objects modified so they grow multiple legs, wings, and breasts. They have no heads, just a nutriment orifice at the top, thus solving a problem for animal rights workers: as their creators say, “No Brain, No Pain.” (Since Oryx and Crake was published, the Chickie Nob solution has made giant strides: lab-grown meat is now a reality, though it is probably not in your sausages yet.)
A sibling book, The Year of the Flood, was published in 2009. Its original title was God’s Gardeners, but although this was perfectly acceptable to the British publisher, the American publisher and the Canadian publisher objected to it on the grounds that people would think the book was a far-right extremist tract, which goes to show how thoroughly the word God has been hijacked. Many other titles were proposed, including “Serpent Wisdom,” which the Canadian publisher liked but which the U.S. felt suggested a hippy New Age cult, and “Edencliff,” which the British thought sounded like “a retirement home in Bournemouth.” Book titles are either immediately obvious, like The Edible Woman, or very hard to decide on, and The Year of the Flood was the second kind.
The Year of the Flood explores the world of Oryx and Crake from a different perspective. Whereas Jimmy/Snowman, the protagonist of Oryx and Crake, has grown up within a privileged though barricaded enclave, The Year of the Flood takes place in the space outside such enclaves, at the very bottom of the social heap. Its pre-disaster plot unfolds in neighbourhoods that the security forces—now melded with corporations—don’t even bother to patrol, leaving them to criminal gangs and anarchic violence. However, this book, too, has a utopia embedded within a dystopia; it’s represented by the God’s Gardeners, a small environmental religious cult dedicated to the sacred element in all Creation. Its members grow vegetables on slum rooftops, sing sacred-nature hymns, and avoid high-tech communications devices such as cell phones and computers on the grounds that they can be used to spy on you—which is entirely true.
Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood cover the same time period, and thus are not sequels or prequels; they are more like chapters of the same book. They have sometimes been described as “apocalyptic,” but in a true apocalypse everything on Earth is destroyed, whereas in these two books the only element that’s annihilated is the human race, or most of it. What survives after the cataclysmic event is not a “dystopia,” because many more people would be required for that—enough to comprise a society. The surviving stragglers do, however, have mythic precedents: a number of myths tell of an annihilating flood survived by one man (Deucalion in Greek myth, Utnapishtim in the Gilgamesh epic) or a small group, like Noah and his family. Do the surviving human beings in Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood represent a dystopic