Science Fiction

By Laura P. Valtorta

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Oryx and Crake, written by Margaret Atwood, is the first book in her MaddAddam trilogy. The other books are The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam. All of Atwood’s futuristic fiction, including The Handmaid’s Tale, is based on actual events, scientific discoveries, or articles in the newspaper. The Handmaid’s Tale is based on a religious cult in New England that was incorporated into the Roman Catholic Church in the 1970s. The women in the cult wore funny get-ups and were unusually subservient to men. The Heart Goes Last is a comedy based on a for-profit prison system, such as we often have in the U.S. and Canada.

I read Oryx and Crake aloud to Marco as we drove to Syracuse, NY last winter. One of the main scientific experiments gone wrong in that trilogy involves a group of animals – “pigoons” – used to create human organs. The altered pigs begin to take on human intelligence.

As we were driving, a biologist came on the radio explaining rapturously about his experiments to create human organs using pigs as the hosts. Marco and I looked at each other. We laughed. But how funny was this? I knew that Atwood read scientific journals as she was writing her fiction. Her father was a scientist.

Atwood’s purpose, as she explains in a recent New Yorker article, is not to sway the reader’s opinion about what is happening to the world, but to point out what is happening in science and modern economy. She says that the reader’s opinion is what counts. Yet her books (some of the best writing around) definitely express an opinion against the controlling nature of corporations. Her characters suffer because of environmental pollution. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the reason that some women are enslaved is that they are fertile; the falling birthrate, brought about by overwhelming levels of pollution, turns people against one another.

It’s difficult to read Oryx and Crake and not walk away with a hatred for large corporations. Atwood’s mistrust of them is obvious as she paints a world in which profit, and the levels of society controlled by corporations, become more important than human life and the health of the earth itself. MaddAddam, Oryx, and Crake are human beings, intelligent and exploited, who react to the evil around them. That evil comes from corporations. Atwood makes this clear.

Atwood is the god of her fictional universe, whether or not she cares to admit her power.