The Prevalence of Science and Technology in Oryx and Crake In 2003, Margaret Atwood wrote a fiction novel based on a dystopian future that focused around the experiences of a man who was once in his childhood called Jimmy and renamed himself Snowman in adulthood. The book is written mostly in the style of a memoir with Snowman recounting his past, the contemporary future, and dealing with his present where he lives isolated with a group of genetically modified humans called “the Crakers”. These humans are named after the narrator's brilliant friend (Glenn), Crake, who designed them. Oryx and Crake provides many examples for contemporary readers to be wary of the developments made by science. In Oryx and Crake, Atwood presents the the science and technology in the book as something to be feared because it is unnatural and because it is unnatural it cannot be absolutely perfect, in fact it will eventually become disastrous. In the future that Atwood presents, things that are made a certain way by nature are often changed by human engineering and the result is not always positive. In Jimmy’s childhood he had a rakunk as a pet and he had named it Killer. A rakunk was an invention of Organ Inc, the company the Jimmy’s father had work for. Jimmy had described that “...in those days: (to) create an animal was so much fun..... …show more content…
The rationale for the modification of chickens was that it removed the “need for added growth hormones” (Atwood 203) and it essentially removed what was deemed useless about chickens by humans and these included “all the brain functions that had nothing to do with digestion, assimilation, and growth”. Through this process the scientists had removed everything that had essentially made chickens difficult and chickens were no longer animals; they became, just simply,