WOLVOGS, PIGOONS AND CRAKERS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 169

contexts detailed in alternating but interconnected narratives through Oryx and
Crake . We begin in the 'future', somewhere around 2025, with a fragile Snowman
struggling to survive in the world in part created by Crake. In the earlier narrative,
which begins in the late 1990s, we meet a young boy called Jimmy (who, we come
to recognise, becomes Snowman) and his new friend Glenn (who becomes Crake)
growing up in a world marked by increasing environmental degradation: pyres
of infected livestock; massive soil erosion; destructive storms and other undeni-
able evidence of catastrophic climate change. Glenn arrives, Jimmy recalls, 'in
September or October, one of those months that used to be called autumn ' (ibid.:
85), the italics underlining how weird the concept of seasons would become; when
they graduate from high school, the highly intelligent Glenn would normally have
gone to Harvard, had it not 'drowned' (ibid.: 211). Texas, we are informed, 'dried
up and blew away' (ibid.: 295). And Jimmy watches a world in environmental
freefall on 'the news: more plagues, more famines, more floods, more insect or
microbe or small-mammal outbreaks, more droughts' (ibid.: 307). All this takes
place in the early years of the twenty-first century, with Jimmy and Glenn as young,
cynical and powerless onlookers.
Glenn, however, has a more sophisticated sense of the state of the planet and of
the potential consequences of environmental catastrophe than does Jimmy:
As a species we are in deep trouble, worse than anyone's saying. They're afraid
to release the stats because people might just give up, but take it from me,
we're running out of space-time. Demand for resources has exceeded supply
for decades in marginal geopolitical areas, hence the famines and the droughts;
but very soon, demand is going to exceed supply for everyone .
(ibid.: 356)
The threat to Earth in Oryx and Crake , then, comes not from Wellsian invaders
from another planet, but from Earth's seemingly most 'successful' species, homo
sapiens . Glenn's plan (as the older Crake) to save the planet entails the simple if
diabolical expedient of bringing the Age of the Anthropocene to an abrupt end by
eradicating humans using a hyper-aphrodisiac called the BlyssPluss Pill that also
generates plague-like death. Not that the humans who take the pill know this, of
course. Indeed, Crake uses the unsuspecting Oryx to distribute the pill globally.
Only later does she realise the connection, telling Jimmy, who is watching the
plague's relentless impact: 'It was in the pills. It was in those pills I was giving
away, the ones I was selling. It's all in the same cities. I went there' (ibid.: 390).
The planet cleansed of humans will be gifted to a posthuman species Crake has
developed and hubristically named 'The Crakers'. Crake's plan involves Snowman
acting—unwittingly to begin with—as the Crakers' protector and guide, while they
establish themselves as the environmentally-aware custodians of human-free world.
That, at least, is Crake's plan, one that involves the rejection of the technologically
reconfigured and damaged nature he grows up in, in favour, ironically, of the
technologically retooled Crakers, who are the result of his own genetic experiments