Overview
The story, shaped as a quasi-autobiography of a character named “Jimmy” and later, “Snowman,”
reflects back from the “present.” The nowtime landscape is the post-apocolypse of a biological disaster that has destroyed humanity as we know it, leaving only bio-engineered animals hazardously roaming a compromised environment and a tribe of oddly innocent "designed" humanoids with even odder reproductive mating rituals and mythic beliefs in Oryx, their teacher and Crake, their maker.
The story unfolds in a series of reflections as Snowman considers his ability to sustain in his present, mirroring his younger days and the larger story of his former life and civilization's quest for immortality that have resulted in debacle. Death-defiance and technological "advancements" offering sustaining youth and and health ultimately leading to the catastrophic event. It is this tale that unfolds through Jimmy's days youth in compounds that would make today’s gated communities salivate with envy.
Snowman's recants Jimmy’s youth, the departure of his mother when following the loss of her moral stomach for the bio-engineered marvels produced by her husband and community and her subsquent outlaw status being monitored by the CorpSeCorps – the grim title for the policing body. Following her departure Jimmy befriends the ingenious Crake and together they the explore the offerings of the media education at the Martha Graham Academy, and his jobs following his “education.
The compounds were controlled environment monitored by the CorpSeCorps. Outside in the pleeblands, the lost souls of humanity resided – humanity run amok.
As the story unfolds so do the revelations of achievement run completely amok when the distinction humanity, engineering and gaming collapse and conflate.
As the story nears its closure we seem to come full circle in the human dilemma, arriving back at the Garden of Eden poised with the fruit of the tree of knowledge in hand. Knowing at this moment potential consequences of unchecked knowledge, we waken into a chapter preceding the book – our “now” on the precipice of either disaster or hope.
Design and engineering as a central theme
Animals: pigoons, wolvogs (wolves and dogs), rakunks
Humans: The Crakers. Resistant to ultra-violet, don’t stink
Food: Soy everything
Games: Extincathon (name an extinct species in the last 50 years) , Kwiktime Osama, Barbarian Stomp (See if you can change history! Cities with riches vs hordes and usually the most visciousness wins.) Blood and Roses: human atrocities against human achievement where the Armenian genoside equals Beethoven’s Ninth plus 3 pyramids. Bloods usually won, but inherited a wasteland.
the communities,
Website and TV: He
media: naked news
branding: OrganInc Farms where they engineer animals to produce human organs; CorpSeCorps,
Noo Skins made by HelthWizer.
Language: Valance, Norn, Seredipity. Pibroch, Lubricious
Examples of design that ask questions:
Dunne and Raby
Pnuematics
Postmodern wardrobe
Strangely Familiar
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