"Time to go": The Post-apocalyptic and The Post-traumatic in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake

Any fictional text, however realistic, portrays a world that is not real. But speculative fiction—as Margaret Atwood designates her futurist, dystopian novels, The Handmaid's Tale (1985), Oryx and Crake (2003), and The Year of the Flood (2009)—offers a particular and explicit challenge to its readers' sense of the temporal distance separating the fictional mise-en-scène from the contemporary real world. Dystopian speculative fiction takes what already exists and makes an imaginative leap into the future, following current socio-cultural, political, or scientific developments to their potentially devastating conclusions. In Atwood's words, speculative fictions explore "the consequences of new and proposed technologies in graphic ways by showing them as fully operational," which is something that "'novels' as usually defined cannot do" (In Other Worlds 62). Yet the imaginative effects of dystopian literary speculations depend precisely on their readers' recognition of a potential social realism in the fictional worlds portrayed therein. These cautionary tales of the future work by evoking an uncanny sense of the simultaneous familiarity and strangeness of these brave new worlds.

The future as imagined in dystopian speculative fiction must be simultaneously recognizable and unrecognizable, both like and not-like the present (see Suvin 71; see also Appleton, Howells, and Mohr). In order to grasp the caution offered by the tale, we must see the imagined future in our actual present and also recognize the difference between now and the future-as-imagined. Thus, the reader of such fiction must sustain a kind of double consciousness with respect both to the fictionality of the world portrayed and to its potential as our own world's future. In Atwood's Oryx and Crake, for example, we find a near-future world that both approximates and projects forward from the political, socio-economical, technological, and climatological givens of our present moment. In the near future as imagined by Atwood, elites work and play in manicured gated communities, while everyone else is relegated to dangerous urban jungles known as pleeblands; biotech corporations command their own secret police forces such as the CorpSeCorps (short for Corporation Security Corps, but also, more grimly, Corpse Corps); genetically engineered life forms are trademarked and marketed for medical purposes and lifestyle enhancement; and the dire effects of rising sea levels and droughts associated with global warming are accepted by a younger generation that mocks the nostalgic longings of their parents and grandparents for a long ago golden age. The futurist setting of the novel suggests that we are at risk of coming to such a pass, though some readers may feel that this is already substantially, if not literally, the way we live now.

Readers of Oryx and Crake are not alone in their temporally uncertain, or doubled, relation to the novel's dystopian mise-en-scène. For Atwood's protagonist—born "Jimmy" but introduced to the reader as "Snowman"—the futurist dystopia sketched above is already a memory. Oryx and Crake opens with Snowman awakening to a bleak, post-apocalyptic world that makes the socio-economic disparities and biotechnological threats of his past, a past in which he was still "Jimmy" and a past that stands as the reader's possibly inevitable future, look rosy by comparison. We don't immediately understand what has happened to Snowman's world, or when, but as we continue to read, we apprehend that Snowman believes himself to be the sole survivor of a global pandemic that has extinguished the rest of humanity. Gradually, we learn of Snowman's largely unwitting, yet also willfully unknowing, complicity in a scheme by which a bioengineered super virus was disseminated across the globe. The same mad scientist (Jimmy's best friend Crake) who masterminded the pandemic also bio-engineered a small tribe of genetically "improved" trans-humans, primitive but gentle replacements for humanity, who have been left under Snowman's care to inherit the earth. From the retrospective point of view of the novel's last man, as well as from the prospective point of view of the novel's reader, the difference...