Oryx and Crake; warnings, satire and pigoons

Oryx and Crake, was written in 2003 by Margaret Atwood, and exhibits a certain level of ambiguity in its classification of genre.  If it had to fall into a particular category, it would most likely be dystopian, but Atwood asserts that the novel might be better classified as “speculative fiction” or “adventure romance”.  For my intents of analyzing the work as a piece of literate and its thematic contents, I will consider the piece a satire, but more importantly a warning.  The novel begins as one of the protagonists is living in a post-apocalyptic world, inhibited by simple, humanlike beings, and strange hybrid animals such as pigoons, wolvogs, and rakunks.  We eerily get the feelings as though we exist in a world with the influences of mankind and natural elements, and yet somehow something is terribly distorted.  As the novel progresses, we see that the true horror of the book is not what happened before the apocalyptic event, but instead the world that existed, and led up to said event. 

            Prior to the shift that led to the demise of all humanity with the exception of the protagonist, snowman, we see a world similar to ours, taking place in the future.  The future we see is one that Atwood speculates could be a possibility if modern trends continue unchecked.  Modern society in the novel is ruled by transnational corporations, who lock their employees in corporate compounds, exacerbating the divide between the rich and the poor.  Entertainment becomes increasingly macabre, and the monetization of sex has become universally acceptable.  Even the natural world becomes distorted and skewed based on the wills of an increasingly greedy humanity; genetic engineering advances to the point where hybrid animals become common. 

            Throughout the novel, the protagonist’s childhood friend Crake slowly transforms from a brilliant student with a morbid fascination of the world that was, to a sort of mad scientist, who, despite his disdain of religion, will eventually become the creator, and God and the world that will come.  Leading up the time of the novel’s opening pages, Crake, now a brilliant scientist, creates a new species to replace humanity, a peaceful, if not duller variety of homo-sapiens, and unleashes a disease that will destroy most of humanity with the exception of the inoculated snowman, who would live on as the protector of the new world’s man.