20 Years of Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood’s Other Horribly Prescient Dystopian Novel

It’s painfully easy to wake up every day, look at the current crumbling political landscape, and compare it to The Handmaid’s Tale. Margaret Atwood’s dystopian drama about a fascistic takeover of America that results in the total stripping away of women’s autonomy slowly went from being a cautionary tale to an instructional guide for right-wing abusers. Republicans’ utter decimation of reproductive freedoms across the country cannot help but evoke images of Gilead, red smocks, and Aunt Lydias. Atwood’s seeming gift of divination is remarkable, although that may have more to do with the disheartening predictability of life under patriarchal rule, something she writes about with wry awareness. When the system is set up in this way, one can’t be surprised when it operates as planned. And the Canadian legend’s skills of prescience extend well beyond her most iconic novel. Her second dystopian tale, the MaddAddam trilogy, imagined another future where humanity doomed itself through biological furor. Predicting one apocalypse is unlucky. Guessing two makes you wonder what Atwood knows that we don’t.
First published 20 years ago this Spring, Oryx and Crake saw Atwood theorize another bleak near-future for this decreasingly green planet. It opens in the aftermath of a cataclysmic incident that wiped out almost every human being and left behind a rewilded landscape dominated by genetically modified animals. One such species is the Crakers, a group of naive human-like creatures who are peaceful, herbivorous, and have breeding seasons more akin to animals than people. Seemingly the only real human left on this land is Jimmy, known to the Crakers as the Snowman, a teacher of sorts who knew their almighty creator. Flashbacks reveal how Jimmy knew Crake, a brilliant scientist with plans to make the world a better place, whether we wanted it or not.
Many a sci-fi novel has explored the notion of science going “too far”, whether it’s through genetic abuse, technological warfare, or good old-fashioned robots running riot. Humanity has never fully embraced the mind-boggling revelations of progress, fearing that playing God will result in our fated extermination. Atwood doesn’t avoid this fate in Oryx and Crake, but she does drive home the inanity of its unfolding. Where The Handmaid’s Tale had to be deadly serious in its worldbuilding, MaddAddam revels in the proud stupidity of corporate supremacy.
Jimmy and Crake’s America is one of a tiered societal divide where the privileged live in gated communities and eat food that was once adjacent to organic produce. Companies with names like RejoovenEsense, HelthWyzer, and CorpSeCorps dominate every aspect of living and create genetic abominations such as ChickieNobs, mutations of chickens that are all breast and no brain for the purposes of consumption. The internet is a hellscape of graphic child pornography, live executions for entertainment, and naked news bulletins. Jimmy attends an arts college, which is viewed with the same disdain as vagrancy, a subject suitable only for the purposes of propaganda for the multi-conglomerates that dominate the landscape. If all of this seems kind of silly, that’s Atwood’s point, and you can’t claim she didn’t hit on something painfully real when she noted the ways that the dumbest shit is quickly elevated to genius when it has the right powers behind it.