Oryx and Crake

Oryx and Crake is a 2003 novel by the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood and the first book of her MaddAddam trilogy. Atwood has described it as speculative fiction and adventure romance rather than science fiction, on the grounds that it deals with things that could already be done rather than with the impossible.

The novel alternates between Snowman's present on a devastated coast and his memories of the world before, when he was Jimmy and his closest friend was Glenn, who became Crake. The account is built from the ordinary material of that time: corporate compounds with their own rules, games and websites, and the genetic engineering that eventually produced both the plague and the Children of Crake.

Atwood keeps the cause of the catastrophe inside human decisions rather than outside them, and her structure means the reader learns what happened at the same rate Snowman is forced to remember it. The sequence continued in The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam, and Atwood's interest throughout is in the way a disaster is prepared for in ordinary offices and laboratories long before anyone recognises it.