Oryx and Crake

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Oryx and Crake ( English Oryx and Crake ) is the title of a very successful dystopian novel by the Canadian author Margaret Atwood , published in 2003 . It is the first part of the MaddAddam trilogy .

action

Jimmy, the main character in the novel Oryx and Crake (whose title alludes to two endangered species: Oryx beisa , an African antelope with long horns, and crake , an Australian red-necked rail ), is a trained advertising specialist of the late 21st century . Before the great world catastrophe, he worked for a biogenetic-pharmaceutical company that carried out top-class research under privileged conditions in Paradice , an elite laboratory isolated from the environment . Since the catastrophe, Jimmy has lived, life-threateningly emaciated, covered in blackness and run-down, on the edge of the region where New York once stood, which in the present moment of action has been largely flooded after the polar ice caps have melted .

As far as he knows, Jimmy is the only survivor in his region - perhaps even worldwide - of a global epidemic that broke out about a quarter of a year before the action was taken , which his former school friend Crake, the ingenious biogeneticist in the Paradice laboratory, deliberately launched and in the guise of a lifestyle drug called BlyssPluss (roughly: “Mega-Wonne”) was systematically distributed in the run-down metropolises of all continents . Crake did this because he given the approaching global ecological catastrophe of climate change , over-population , resource and food shortages and Artendezimierung only an opportunity for the remaining flora and fauna saw the planet Earth, when Homo sapiens sapiens would repaid by him. That is why Crake had secretly created in his laboratory not only the pathogen of the epidemic, which was constructed for a simultaneous outbreak , but also a transgenic human race, the specimens of which were already known as Craker by his closest environment during his lifetime . The Craker can not only  withstand the epidemic and the accompanying circumstances of climate change - for example the UV- rich solar radiation that is no longer filtered by any ozone layer - they were also biogenetically programmed away by Crake everything that, in his opinion, the species Homo sapiens sapiens a peaceful and Ecologically adapted coexistence with one another and with the other earthly forms of life made impossible: above all, the human self- preservation and preservation of species , which have now become destructive and which go far beyond the necessities of species preservation , but also the fear of death including religiosity, thirst for knowledge, the pursuit of property and the desire for animal protein in the form of meat or fish. The new breed of peace-loving, gentle and (at least initially) simple-minded vegetarians would - so Crake apparently hoped - ensure the long-term survival of the world's ecosystem after Homo sapiens sapiens had managed to drastically increase biodiversity in the last two hundred of the forty thousand years of its existence reduce and gradually worsen the living conditions of all forms of life on the planet, a process that would soon lead to the complete collapse of the global ecosystem. Now Crake is dead, shot by Jimmy at the moment when Crake wanted to return from a last stay "outside" to the high-security laboratory shortly after the outbreak of the epidemic, but when she returned, apparently for no reason, murdered her lover, the Asian Oryx, in front of Jimmy's eyes who had been used by Crake in the months and years before the outbreak of the epidemic as - unsuspecting - propagandist and dealer for BlyssPluss as well as "cultural trainer " for his Craker.

Jimmy, vegetating in the post-catastrophic presence of action, has a lot of leisure to reflect on the prehistory of his present existence at the time “when the groundwater near the coast became brackish and the northern permafrost thawed, when the huge tundra was boiling with methane gas and the drought in the central continental North American lowlands never ended when the Asian steppes turned into sandy deserts and meat became increasingly difficult to find ”. Jimmy reflects on the prehistory in the form of flashbacks and turns that are woven into the description of events in the presence of action and begin with Jimmy's earliest memory when he was five or six years old and with his parents - both biogeneticists in one of the genetic pharma companies - looked at a stake on which infected cattle were burned. Jimmy's memories essentially follow his fictional biography from here and deal with his school days - when he befriended Crake - his college days, and his first years of professional activity, which eventually leads him to work as an advertising specialist in Crake's laboratory.

In the post-catastrophic presence of the plot, Jimmy has made it his business to continue the life's work of Crake and Oryx in relation to the Craker. They call him “ Snow Man ” and venerate him as a kind of prophet because - as the Crakers once learned before they were released into the wild - he was a confidante of Crake and Oryx and can explain many of the phenomena that the Crakers themselves with theirs child's intellect cannot explain. Jimmy "snow man" realizes that his lack of existence will lead sooner or later to death by starvation, and considers, therefore - and because he already no future looks for itself - even once suicide to commit, but in an upsurge of his will to survive he leaves the Craker temporarily himself and embarks on an expedition to the ruins of the Paradice research laboratory, several days' walk away , from where he hopes to bring equipment, medicines, food and, above all, weapons with which he will keep the hunoolves and organ pigs at bay - transgenic animal breeds, which, like many other organisms, had been produced and commercially used by biogenetics corporations before the epidemic disaster: the hunolves, for example, because of their cuddly dog-like aggressiveness for special guarding tasks, the organ pigs as organ donors for human replacement organs. Under the post-catastrophic conditions, both races have become dangerous because they are quite intelligent predators, because of which Jimmy has to spend every night in a tree: Only there he can feel safe from these new enemies. Jimmy finds what he is looking for in the ruined laboratory, but on the way back to the crackers he tracks down three other human survivors of the epidemic. The novel openly ends at the point where Jimmy struggles with whether to contact them or eliminate them as enemies and a threat to the Crakers.

literature

  • Margaret Atwood: Oryx and Crake . McClelland & Stewart, Toronto 2003, ISBN 0-7710-0868-6 (first publication)
  • Margaret Atwood: Oryx and Crake . Berliner Taschenbuch-Verlag, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-8333-0139-2

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Doom snores . ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed August 11, 2019]).
  2. ^ Sven Birkerts: Present at the Re-Creation . In: The New York Times . May 18, 2003, ISSN  0362-4331 ( nytimes.com [accessed August 11, 2019]).

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