Oryx And Crake: A Utopian Society

One man alone destroyed the entire world in an attempt to create a utopian society. The creation of his ideal world generated utter chaos, wiping out the human race to replace it with his bioengineered humanoids. Preceding the orderly eradication of the human race, the world was left in destruction and damage, though they were not the only remnants. A new world begins with the ending of the human race by cataclysmic epidemic followed by the emergence of a perfect race. Margaret Atwood’s science fiction novel, Oryx and Crake, explores a globalized world, particularly the social constructs and unforeseen consequences of a science-driven, culturally eroded society dominated by hyper-commodification and corporate supremacy.
A young scientist by
Corporations specialize in the manufacturing of organs for organ replacement, pills and lotions that encompass youth, beauty, and vitality, genetic modification for immortality, as well as cures to various diseases. The four major corporations in the novel, OrganInc, HelthWyzer, AnooYoo, and RejoovenEsence, manufacture and sell products that have been formulated with the expectation of dependency. AnooYoo and RejoovenEsence appeal to the populace with their lifestyle enhancing drugs; society falls susceptible to their infiltration and marketing tactics, obsessing over every new, expensive product and all the artificial promises it has to offer. According to Crake, HelthWyzer not only sells drugs that contain the cure for diseases, but actually creates more diseases to sell new drugs that will cure them. Corporate control over the masses is a consequence of unprecedented greed. Capitalistic globalization in Oryx and Crake far exceeds the health and beauty corporations. The production of food has become an engineering project of the compounds as well, in essence, food-related global commerce. While most food corporations in the novel have developed a fast maturation process for their chickens, colleagues at Crake’s University, Watson-Crick (the equivalent of Harvard) have engineered a way to limit their creation to the parts they want in “a three-week improvement on the most efficient low-light, high-density chicken farming operations so far devised” (Atwood 203). This globalized economy excels on the marketing of products as a manufacturacion of their parts. These parts, called Chicken Nobs, do not resemble chickens at all; each one merely a “large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was