Thursday, July 10, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Books: End of the world as we know it

By John Ziebell

When we talk about destroying the world, we don't mean it literally. We can't demolish a planet that meteor strikes haven't. What is possible, and likely, is we'll render our home uninhabitable to "civilization"--humans, and probably every other life form except bacteria and cockroaches. But the physical world is amazingly resilient. After a few centuries, curious interstellar travelers might never know we'd been here, except maybe for the inexplicably radioactive hot spots around places that were once named Chernobyl and Mercury, Nev.

If self-destruction isn't hardwired into our brainpans, it's at least a common enough idea that post-apocalypse existence has become a narrative mainstay. Not only in science fiction, but in the novels of Booker Prize winners like Margaret Atwood, who's been writing dark, cautionary tales for some time now, along with poetry, short stories, children's literature, essays--about 30 books in all.

What makes Oryx and Crake compelling is that the story rests on the musings of a highly attuned cultural critic rather than the stereotypes of a genre robot. The end of the world, when it comes, is the logically inevitable end of a society that has split itself irrecoverably along a single class denomination--those who live inside Compounds vs. those who do not--that reflects the schism between those with money and those without, those who create technology and those who slave to purchase it, those who enjoy real food and those who survive on bioengineered substitutes.

We're introduced to all this, after the fact, by the ramblings of Snowman, a lost and lonely soul who wanders the shoreline of a depopulated world dressed in a sheet, a Red Sox hat and a pair of sunglasses with one lens. While we'd like a more credible source than this verbose but fragmented zombie--"There are a lot of blank spaces in the stub of his brain, where memory used to be"--it quickly becomes evident that whatever story we get will necessarily be gleaned through him.

And there's a lot of story. Back when Snowman's name was Jimmy he was a typically unhappy child of the elite. His disinterested father was an executive on the design team that gave the world pigoons, genetically altered pigs that provided not bacon but multiple human organs for harvest. And raccoon/skunk hybrids spliced for pets, and the dogs loaded with wolf genes to guard the Compound moats... When his mom broke out of her lethargic Stepford haze it wasn't to overdose on Valium or jump the tennis pro, but to go native with a band of underground activists living somewhere in the anarchy beyond the Compound walls, a death-penalty lifestyle with predictable consequences. And so on.

Snowman has responsibilities that intrude on his mental ramblings. He's the guardian of the Children of Oryx and the Children of Crake, a tribe of beautifully engineered and hopelessly na•ve male and female humanoids created by the title characters: Oryx, Jimmy's lover, a former child prostitute from a Third World village she doesn't even remember, and Crake, his only boyhood friend, who matured into the R&D diva of the world's top biotech firm.

Their story becomes his--or, more accurately, he becomes part of theirs. The triangle has a strange and uneven development. Jimmy likes sex, not science; he constantly longs for human contact rather than the easy consolations of simulacra. He is not one with the system that his friends dominate so effortlessly. While that world may be miserable, it's the one society has earned. It's also one where hubris is more than a mere possibility.

"The elimination of one generation," Crake suggests. "Beetles, trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever. Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it's game over forever."

That's Crake's plan, using an army of replicants whose human weaknesses, he believes, have been purged along with their institutional memory. Why be satisfied with creating new skin for aging millionaires when you could change history--say, re-create civilization without any knowledge of its tools for and tendencies toward self-immolation?

But dreams don't always come true, even for the technologically proficient. And it's no surprise that Jimmy, who never really connected with the paradigm, is left alone to document perfection in its real-world defect and parse the suicidal arrogance of a civilization dedicated solely to overriding its natural limitations when--as perhaps is fitting--there's nobody left to listen.