WOLVOGS, PIGOONS AND CRAKERS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 174

. . . Not to keep us out, but to keep them in. Mankind needs barriers in both
cases.'
When Jimmy asks who is 'them', Crake replies 'Nature and God' (ibid.: 250).
Crake has, however, been playing a double game. While insinuating himself
into the highest levels of the genetic engineering industry, he is secretly planning
to wipe out humanity using the very technological and scientific superiority that
has maintained human dominion over the planet in the Age of the Anthropocene.
Not only will his BlyssPlus Pill effectively eradicate homo sapiens , but he also has
engineered a replacement species, the Crakers, to rule in their place. All this must
be kept hidden, of course, and the Crakers are created at a clandestine research
facility, Paradice, its name redolent of an earlier creation by an earlier deity. Crake
does not make the Crakers in his image—given that he wants to wipe out his own
species, that would be nonsensical—but he cannot resist giving them his name, and
it is he alone who chooses their posthuman characteristics, including their colour:
'They're amazingly attractive, these children—each one naked, each one perfect,
each one a different skin colour—chocolate, rose, tea, butter, cream, honey—but
each with green eyes. Crakes's aesthetic' (ibid.: 10). Beyond the purely visual
element, the Crakers have been engineered so that human traits such as com-
petition, lust and envy are eradicated. Old age and fear of death, with the potential
personal and social anxieties and disturbances they might trigger, have been
eliminated, in that the Crakers are designed to drop dead at 30. And they are pre-
adapted to the beleaguered environment of 2025, having 'a UV-resistant skin, a
built-in insect repellant, an unprecedented ability to digest unrefined plant material.
As for immunity from microbes, what had until now been done with drugs would
now be innate' (ibid.: 366). Additionally, by altering 'the ancient primate brain',
its 'destructive features' such as racism, the desire for hierarchy, territoriality and
sexuality are controlled; sexuality is 'not a constant torment to them, not a cloud
of turbulent hormones: they came into heat at regular intervals, as did most
mammals other than man' (ibid.: 367). As Crake tells Jimmy:
[The Crakers] were perfectly adjusted to their habitat, so they would never
have to create houses or tools or weapons, or, for that matter, clothing. They
would have no need to invent any harmful symbolisms, such as kingdoms,
icons, gods or money. Best of all, they recycled their own excrement. By
means of a brilliant splice, incorporating genetic material from . . .
(ibid.: 367)
At this point Jimmy interrupts Crake's visionary explanation, but what is clear is
the latter's unshakeable confidence that the Crakers represent an evolutionary
response perfectly attuned to—and capable of rejuvenating—a denuded planet.
What Jimmy does not realise at this point, and what Crake actively hides from him,
is that this invasion of the bodysplices has been planned by Crake to supersede
rather than to supplement humanity, and that Jimmy, reborn as Snowman, will