Title: Oryx and Crake Author: Margaret Atwood

The narrator of Atwood's riveting novel calls himself Snowman.  When the story opens, he is sleeping in a tree, wearing an old bedsheet, mourning the loss of his beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death.  He searches for supplies in a wasteland where insects proliferate and pigoons and wolvogs ravage the pleeblands, where ordinary people onced lived, and the Compounds that sheltered the extraordinary.  As he tries to piece together what has taken place, the narrative shifts to decades earlier.  How did everything fall apart so quickly?  Why is he left with nothing but his haunting memories?  Alone except for the green-eyed Children of Crake, who think of him as a kind of monster, he explores the answers to these questions in the double journey he takes - into his own past, and back to Crake's high-tech bubble-dome, where the Paradice Project unfolded and the world came to grief.

Jimmy's family works and lives in a walled Compound protected by the dangerous CorpSeCorps and run by OrganInc Farms.  Jimmy's father works on a project designed to grow 'assortments of...human-tissue organs in a... pig host.  Organs that would transplant smoothly and avoid rejection, but would also  be able to fend off... microbes and viruses, of which there were more and more strains every year.'

Life for Jimmy is good, safe, comfortable.  He's grows up as any other child would, completely oblivious to what's really happening in the world in which his parents do business.  Soon Crake, a boy who turns out to be Jimmy's new best friend, arrives on the Compound.  The boys spend all their free time together playing computer games, and watching movies online, including live executions, assisted suicide and of course, porn.  The boys stumble across one website that kept them coming back: HottTotts, a sex-kiddie site.  There they see Oryx for the first time.

'None of those little girls had ever seemed real to Jimmy - they'd always struck him as digital clones - but for some reason Oryx was three-dimensional from the start.'

Crake prints an image of her face for him, her gaze piercing directly into the camera, 'right into Jimmy's eyes, into the secret person inside of him.  I see you, that look said.'

As the boys grow up they are divided into two basic groups that had been previously engrained on their society.  Crake, easily at the top of every class, a genetic genius, is classified as having a mathematical mind, was far above Jimmy who is classified as the class clown.  Crake goes on to be a genetic genius, Jimmy goes on to be a joke.  They are placed in separate schools, Crake, at the prestigious Watson-Crick, and Jimmy to Martha Graham, school for the perusal of the arts. 

'A lot of what went on at Martha Graham was like studying Latin, or book-binding: pleasant to contemplate in its way, but no longer central to anything.'

Jimmy and Crake keep in touch mostly by email and after a while Jimmy begins to doubt the friendship they'd once had.  He begins to think of Crake as someone he used to know.  Until he receives an invite from Crake.  Jimmy accepts, eager to see his friend.

'"Hi there, cork-nut," said Crake, and nostalgia swept through Jimmy like sudden hunger.  He was so pleased to see Crake he almost wept.'

Upon arriving at Watson-Crick Himmy can't help but notice how different their two schools are.  'Compared with Martha Graham Watson-Crick is a palace.'

Jimmy questions Crake about some of the work they're doing trying not to sound impressed.

'"This is the latest," said Crake.

What they were looking at was a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin.  Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing.

"Those are chickens," said Crake.  "Chicken parts... twelve to a growth unit... That's the head right in the middle.  There's a mouth opening at the top, they dump... nutrients in there.  No eyes or beak or anything, they don't need those."

The thing was a nightmare... an animal-protein tuber.

"They'd removed all the brain functions that had nothing to do with digestion, assimilation and growth... They've already fog the take-out franchise operation in place... Investors are lining up around the block.  They can undercut the price fo everyone else.  ChickieNobs, they're thinking of calling the stuff,"' Crake explains.'

ChickieNobs?  Jimmy can't fathom eating what he imagines are equal to giant warts.  As his visits goes on he realizes that ChickieNobs aren't even the worst.

Crake begins to question Jimmy, probing the depth of his knowledge.  He begins to talk about conspiracy theories, even going so far as to suggest that both of their parents had known about and probably participated in immoral activities, namely infecting the population with manufactured virus's and bioforms. 

'"They're creating them," Crake confides..."They put the hostile bioforms into their vitamin pills..."'

Jimmy, who isn't as smart as Crake, can't quite grasp what his friend is telling him.  He puts it aside claiming to be tired.  After the visit Jimmy goes home, graduates from Martha Graham and forgets all about Crake's wild theories.  He finds a sleazy job in the marketing department for 'AnooYoo; Pills to make you fatter, thinner, hairier, balder, whiter, browner, blacker, yellower, sexier and happier.  It was his task to describe and extol to present the vision of what - oh, so easy! - could come to be... Once in a while he'd make up a work and never once got caught.'

After a few years of this and an endless string of married lovers, Jimmy finds himself restless and angry.  This is only alleviated by Crake randomly showing up at his door one night.

'"Let's go to the pleeblands," he says to Jimmy.

Accepted wisdom in the Compounds said that nothing of interest went on in the pleeblands apart from buying and selling... plus a lot of criminal activity: but to Jimmy it looked mysterious and exciting... on he other side of the safety barriers.  Also dangerous.  He wouldn't know how to behave...

Before setting out Crake stuck a needle in Jimmy's arm - an all-purpose, short-term vaccine he'd cooked up himself.  The pleeblands, he said, were a giant petri-dish; a lot of guck and contagious plasm got spread around there...

Jimmy had never been to the pleeblands before... he was excited... though he wasn't prepared for so many people... The pleebland inhabitants didn't look like the mental deficients the Compounders were fond of depicting... After a while Jimmy began to relax and enjoy the experience.'

After drinking and dining on rare delicacies Jimmy only barely remembers agreeing to come work for Crake, helping him with his highly respected and cutting edge projects.  Monday morning finds Jimmy being congratulated by co-workers and supervisors alike on his new promotion into Crake's prestigious world.  They 'had already been discreetly informed by Crake personally.'

'"My unit's called Paradice," said Crake.  "What we're working on is immortality."

Which had led to the concept of BlyssPluss... a single pill, that one and the same time:

1.  would protect the user against all known sexually transmitted diseases
2. would provide an unlimited supply of energy
3. would prolong youth
   

... There would be a fourth point which would not be advertised.  The BlyssPluss Pill would also act as a sure-fire one-time-does-it-all birth-cntrol pill, for male and female alike...

"So, basically you're going to sterilize people without them knowing it under the guise of giving them the ultra in orgies?" Jimmy asks.

"That's a crude way of putting it," said Crake.  "The investors were very keen on it, it was going to be global... You'll do the ad campaign."'

But Crake's real purpose is eventually revealed.  Under a secure air-locked dome Crake has gathered a group of the best, most advanced individuals he could find, the 'cream of the crop' most of whom had found themselves on the wrong side of the CorpSeCorps, or the government.  Crake offered them somewhere safe where they could continue their work anonymously on Crake's special and prestigious projects; the most important one being no less than Crake's life ambition.

'"I thought you were working on immortality," Jimmy asks after seeing the 'floor model' of Crakes latest work. 

Immortality," said Crake, "is a concept.  If you take 'mortality' as being, not death, but the fore knowledge of it and the fear of it, then 'immmortality' is the absence of such fear.'

It was all very top-secret and 'inextricably linked - the Pill and the Project.  The Pill would put a stop to haphazard reproduction, the Project would replace it with a superior method.  They were two stages of a single plan...'

Jimmy lives and works with Crake, and inevitably, Oryx, Jimmy's only true love.  Crake had rescued her, sort of speak, from a life of sex service to a life servicing him.  Both he and Jimmy are in love with her, though Oryx is certain Crake will never find out about her and Jimmy.  Jimmy is enjoying his time with them and the perks that come with being Crake's best friend.  Until one day the world seems to erupt in a new bioform attack, one that is devastating and deadly.  No one is immune, no one escapes, except Jimmy.  He watches Oryx and Crake die and is left alone locked inside the dome with the Project, waiting.

'For the first two weeks he followed world events on the Net... He lived off Crake's emergency stroes, the frozen goods first... Meanwhile, the end of[his] species was taking place before his very eyes... Finally there was nothing more to watch, except old movies on DVD.'

Jimmy knows that, at some point, he and the Children of Crake, must be set free from the dome to face a changed world, one where survival is not guaranteed.

Oryx and Crake is a descriptive novel focusing on the future of our world, the future of our technology, our ambition, our desire for power and greed for more, should it be allowed to continue unbridled.  It outlines the perils we as humans find ourselves in, trying to reconcile a healthier planet with the urge to buy more.  Orxy and Crake is a book that will not let you go.  You will think of it's implications long after the words are done.

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