WOLVOGS, PIGOONS AND CRAKERS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 166

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WOLVOGS, PIGOONS AND CRAKERS
Invasion of the bodysplices in
Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake
Peter Marks
'Invasion' usually suggests unwanted intrusion from outside a specific territory, be
it a continent, a nation, a region, even a house. The title of this chapter references
Don Siegel's 1956 film classic Invasion of the Bodysnatchers , which broadens the
intrusive threat to planetary dimensions. In Siegel's film, the small Californian town
of Santa Mira is invaded by extraterrestrials, who replace the local population with
exact physical replicas of its citizens, but devoid of emotion or individuality.
Because of when it was released, the film has sometimes been read as a Cold War
allegory, the 'aliens' being equivalent to Soviet-inspired Communists. Ironically,
others have interpreted it as signalling the rise of McCarthyism in the United States,
while the author of the novel from which the film was adapted meant it as a
warning against Eisenhower-era conformity (see LaValley, 1989). An intriguing
aspect of the invasion is that the replicas arrive as spores from outer space, carried
through Earth's atmosphere by the wind; they grow to maturity in bean-like 'pods'.
Narratives depicting invasion from outer space date back at least to H. G. Wells's
brilliant The War of the Worlds (1898), where the technologically superior Martians
seem set, quickly and brutally, to take control of Earth. Again, there is a critical
biological component, in this case, the terrestrial bacteria to which the Martians
have no resistance, and which eventually destroy them. Where Invasion of the
Bodysnatchers ends on a dramatically ambiguous note, the hero literally appealing
to the film's audience to do something about the undetected invaders in their midst,
in The War of the Worlds the natural environment rescues an otherwise defeated
human race, destroying the would-be invaders.
Wells's generative genius also is traceable in a more recent novel, Margaret
Atwood's 2004 speculative fiction Oryx and Crake . Atwood deals with an array of
social, cultural, biological and ecological possibilities in her novel, including the
gene-splicing of animals to produce hybrids such as 'wolvogs' (which map wolves
on to dogs) and 'pigoons' (a mixture of pig and racoon) and the creation of a