WOLVOGS, PIGOONS AND CRAKERS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 175

play a critical role in the triumph of his project. Crake's plan depends on the
invisibility of the Crakers to all but those within Paradice, and the concealment of
his real plan from all others in the Paradice elect. Where Siegel and Wells had
imagined invasions from without, from other planets, Crake's invasion comes from
within.
Ultimately, despite Crake's megalomanic certainty, the collapse of the human
civilisation that he brings about, a world without churches or God, is also one
without zoos, so that the wolvogs and pigoons are free to roam, to menace and to
kill. As Snowman realises, these malevolent splices easily have the power to wipe
out Crake's idealised posthumans. And as well as those antagonistic specimens of
that earlier, commercially-determined genetic engineering that Crake pretended
to accept, but in fact detested, there are other forces in play that Crake has failed
to envisage. Most obvious among these are humans besides Snowman who have,
despite the catastrophe of the BlyssPlus plague, managed to survive in tiny num-
bers. Snowman had repeatedly wondered about this possibility, hoping that there
might be
Monks in desert hideaways, far from contagion; mountain goatherders who'd
never mixed with the valley people; lost tribes in the jungles. Survivalists
who'd tuned in early [to news of the global catastrophe], shot all comers,
sealed themselves in their underground bunkers. Hillbillies; recluses, wander-
ing lunatics, swathed in protective hallucinations. Bands of nomads, following
the ancient ways.
(ibid.: 268)
Most of these imagined survivors are less implicated in the excesses of human
exploitation of the environment than the kind who would overindulge in
ChickieNobs or slavishly desire the orgiastic sex activated by BlyssPlus. The novel
in fact ends with Snowman discovering a small group of humans (who may or may
not fit the list above) and not knowing whether or not to make contact with them,
for there are unknowable consequences for the trusting, physically underpowered
and dangerously innocent Crakers. Snowman's role as guardian stays his hand. And
there is also the planet itself, which is beginning to recover from the ravages of
both the Age of the Anthropocence and the consequences of Crake's attack upon
the dominant species. When Snowman revisits one of the compounds, he realises
on his way back that 'the botany is thrusting itself through every crack', and that
soon this district will be 'impassable', a 'thick tangle of vegetation' (ibid.: 267-268).
If impassable for him, then it is also potentially impassable for the much less
physically robust Crakers. The very environment for which they were designed
might imprison them. What these problems indicate is that Crake, despite his
omniscient and omnipotent aspirations, has not foreseen all possibilities.
Crucially, his shortcomings as a would-be god also run to the Crakers
themselves. Crake planned that Snowman, once he realised the full implications of
what Crake had done, would protect the Crakers while they developed free from