Oryx and Crake

"Shortlist"

"Yes, Oryx and Crake came out in 2003 – so it’s much newer than The Handmaid’s Tale . It’s a really strange novel, but again, it’s on my list because I’ve never seen anything like it. The words in the title, they’re animals, but they actually refer to people. One of them, Crake, is a scientist, a genetic engineer; and essentially, he’s a sort of evil villain character. He’s really, really interesting. He engineers a great pandemic, which wipes out most of the world. And he is in a relationship with this very ethereal woman, who we never really get to know very well, who is known as Oryx. It’s a difficult book to summarise, because it’s very hallucinatory and weird! Every aspect of it is brighter than life, somehow. The basic plot follows a man who in the narrative present is called the Snowman, and he lives in a post-apocalyptic world. He’s surrounded by these very innocent humans who seem a lot like the Eloi in The Time Machine by HG Wells , but he calls them the Crakers – which gives you a clue about who made them. They’re just very simple, very innocent, quick, cheerful people; and he’s really the only old-style human, who seems to survive and thrive while he’s spending his time with them. He narrates what has happened to the world; and what has happened to the world, step-by-very-slow-step, is Crake and Oryx, who they venerate. So, it’s a weird dystopian apocalypse story, and so many of the themes seem really prescient. In the before times, the world is dominated by super-rich mega-companies. Anyone who’s middle-class and upwards works for them, and they live in compounds that keep them safe from the real world. It’s in one of these compounds that Crake works. It’s very, very dark; both of these men, Snowman and Crake, are not good men. They’re really, really not. They do terrible things. And it’s from this immensely dysfunctional friendship, and their love triangle with Oryx, that the new world is born. We are invested in the love triangle, but it’s incredibly dark… I would say most of the books on this list are just about joy. This book is not about joy, at all. Parts of it are really nasty. Take the way they meet Oryx – they see her first in child pornography. And Crake, through weird means, hires her to look after the new humans that he’s made, to be their teacher, but to be a prostitute as well. She has a different relationship with the narrator, Snowman… So it is a really important central relationship, but it’s poisonous. This is the opposite of the joyful kind of romance that can really illuminate sci fi. This is the darkest, nastiest kind of relationship that you can imagine. And it’s that grit and that horror that informs the birth of this new world, and ironically, the innocence of the Crakers."

"Oryx and Crake is here because it’s about the logical conclusion of a whole set of processes that we could have called progress. In my lecture I talked about the logic of progress: the logic of science and technology, the logic of markets, the logic of bureaucracy. And if you want a wonderful dystopian vision of what happens if you take these forward without any recourse to ethical considerations – without asking what progress represents – then Oryx and Crake does that. This novel was recommended by Karen Buck MP and it has influenced me as a wonderful account of a world run by large biotech corporations, where society is deeply dysfunctional and on the verge of self-destruction because nobody has stopped to say, ‘Is this the right thing to do? Is this the human thing to do? What does it mean to be human and are we still human beings?’ The book is a scream of, ‘When do we ask the big questions about any of this?’ It’s a brilliant book and Margaret Atwood is my favourite novelist. Sometimes I feel a bit guilty about reading novels because I think of it as a bit self-indulgent but she is bracing and makes you think."