MaddAddam

The first novel of the trilogy, Oryx and Crake (2004), begins at what seems like the end of the world. Before Crake pulls the metaphorical pin, society is unquestionably mired in a technological dystopia. Jimmy, the protagonist of the first book, grows up in the literally insulated world of Corps compounds among the privileged within a society dictated by corporate totalitarianism. As the child of Corp scientists, Jimmy moves through the pipeline that identifies potential and sends Corp children through to an assigned school and then assigned employment. Readers see this technological utopia through Jimmy’s eyes as a child. His mother, who resists and questions the Corps, seems unstable and then absent. His father complies, and he seems to be the stable parent. Neither are warm nor nurturing. Then, Jimmy meets Glenn, and they become best friends. Unlike Jimmy, who is outgoing and witty, Glenn is brilliant but socially uninterested. Glenn’s father was murdered by the Corps (officially labeled a death by suicide), so he lives with his mother and “Uncle” Pete who are as inattentive as Jimmy’s parents. Like teenagers in any technologically enhanced era, Jimmy and Glenn spend time smoking weed, playing games, and looking at illicit media on the internet, but the media they’re consuming is the commercialized streaming of suicides, executions, and the sexual abuse of children. One day, Jimmy is taken aback by the way one of the young girls stares at the camera defiantly. Glenn notices and prints a screenshot for him. In a game called Extinctathon, they take their codenames, Crake and Thickney, after extinct birds. Jimmy’s name doesn’t stick, but Glenn becomes Crake.

Crake gives the complacent Jimmy a window into the dark, corrupted, exploitative world outside the sheltered compounds. Jimmy and Crake separate when Crake is placed at a top-tier college for science, and Jimmy is placed at the run-down bottom-rung school for the arts. Art can be technologically manufactured by an AI that can put any actors in any storyline designed in the style of any artist, so human artists have little value when the Corps profit most on scientific innovation. When visiting Crake, Jimmy discovers that Crake still plays Extinctathon, but it’s a gateway into an ecoterrorist chatroom that plans their attacks. They drift apart, and after they graduate, Jimmy is hired by one of the lower-level Corps to write advertisement copy. Although Jimmy is intelligent and creative, his skills aren’t considered useful. His life as a cog in the Corps machine feels empty, and he is unfulfilled by endless affairs with women. Visiting the sites he discovered with Crake, one day he comes across a video of his mother being executed for treason. Jimmy keeps the printed picture of the defiant little girl, unsure why he finds her so captivating. Acts of unrest and rebellion are happening on the edge of his consciousness, but compound life shelters inhabitants and keeps them unaware that what they see as shelter is corporate dictatorship. Crake reaches out again, offering Jimmy a job on his project for one of the most prominent Corps, and Jimmy is whisked off to a newer, much nicer compound.

Crake has hired Jimmy to write the advertising copy for BlyssPluss, a drug he has invented that increases sexual pleasure and acts as a prophylactic against pregnancy and disease. He also takes Jimmy outside the compounds to the pleeblands, the filthy, crumbling home of the ungoverned masses who buy Corp products. The trip requires special passes and an antibiotic shot, but the biggest surprise is Oryx (an Extinctathon code name), who Crake found as a sex worker and hired to work for him. Jimmy is convinced that Oryx is the defiant girl from the video, although she denies it. Oryx is Crake’s girlfriend in a sense, but Jimmy falls in love with her, and they start a relationship. She is an illusion, a sex worker ordered to physical specifications, who is likely just a lookalike. Technological advances create a lot of illusions and imitations to stand in for the real thing. Crake confides that the BlyssPluss pills will also sterilize those who take them, a covert population control method to reduce strain on collapsing infrastructures. Oryx is also helping him with his line of genetically modified humans, which Crake claims are showing off features for DNA designer babies. However, the BlyssPluss pills contain a virus that kills off most of humanity, which Crake disseminated to create his own technological utopia. His genetically modified humans are created through scientific technology to become Crake’s ideal human race. Crake kills Oryx, provoking Jimmy to kill him, intending to leave Jimmy as the only person left to help the Crakers.

Crake’s idea of a utopia is solely utilitarian. Even as a dead man, he is trying to exert totalitarian control through the genetic design of the Crakers, who he expects to act as they are biologically programmed to act. The Crakers are human, but Crake has taken away everything he deems unnecessary or a cause of human conflict. They’re designed to think literally, which is meant to do away with artistic expression. They have no aggression or territoriality, and they don’t fall in love and pair bond, so no one is fighting and killing for passion. Their mating ritual leaves paternity unknown, so there are no family lineages. Although the Crakers turn out to have potential for much more when integrated into a society of regular humans, Crake’s plan was to create a perfect, peaceful, utopian society by stripping away the urge to create and innovate even though the parts of humanity that make it messy and volatile are the reasons to continue existing in the first place. The Crakers are meant to simply live and survive happily, equipped with abilities and anatomy that make them well-suited to the environment. For Jimmy, this existence is hell on earth. He still needs the products of human innovation, so he must go crawling in the wreckage of mass death to find them. He still loves and mourns, pining for Oryx, and the Crakers, it turns out, start to develop signs of abstract thought and religion anyway. The novel critiques the notion of a technological utopia or the idea that an ideal world can be invented and built to specification.