“All it takes,” said Crake, “is the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything. Beetles, trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever. Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it’s game over forever” (Atwood 223). This theory, related by Crake in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, is first introduced while two of the main characters, Jimmy and Crake, are both in college. Although there are earlier instances in the novel that foreshadow Crake’s obsession, Crake’s college years give readers the insight of the beginning of his idea of creating a utopian environment. Intent on destroying all of human life, Crake created a primitively-designed new species, affectionately named the “Crakers,” to jump-start this utopian world. His main idea was to base his new world on science and to only program the replacement humans or Crakers to function in basic instinctive ways, such as having animal-like reproduction and having no emotional attachments to fellow Crakers. In this process, Crake also pushed to destroy all institutions that promoted advanced societies—religion, art, politics, and so on. Crake’s attempt at creating this utopian atmosphere was planned, perfected, and timed out to the minute. How, though, did it fail and instead become a dystopian world?
Crake’s main theory behind his utopian plans was to incorporate the sciences as much as possible. Because he was a “numbers” person, this theory coincided perfectly with Crake’s personal experiences and way of life. In his essay “Survival in Margaret Atwood’s Novel Oryx and Crake,” Earl G. Ingersoll notes that Crake designed his plan so that it was “masquerading as an idealistic mission to ‘save the world,’ even if he must destroy that world in order to save it” (Ingersoll 166). Ingersoll continues by stating that Crake knew that humans could not continue to thrive in the twentieth century environment they had created, especially with detrimental factors such as “burning fossil fuels and…a mushrooming population” (Ingersoll 166). Because he believed that human beings were already on their way to becoming extinct, he decided to wipe out the current populace and design a species that would be able to adapt and survive in such a polluted environment. Although he was the one to act on the idea, Crake was not the only person who believed that human nature had disrupted itself. At one point in his post-Martha Graham years, Jimmy lives with Amanda, his girlfriend at the time, and two male artists. The artists, who do not hold a very high opinion of Jimmy, have their own joint view of human life. According to the artists,
It had been game over once agriculture was invented, six or seven thousand years ago. After that, the human experiment was doomed, first to gigantism due to a maxed-out food supply, and then to extinction, once all the available nutrients had been hovered up (Atwood 242-243).
The artists also claimed that “human society…was a sort of monster, its main by-products being corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain. Soon…there would be nothing left but a series of long subterranean tubes covering the surface of the planet” (243). In the artists’ view, humans would eventually be reduced to crawl through these “tubes” naked and eventually fed to other thriving individuals (243). Although a bit different from Crake’s view, the similarities were prevalent. With his and other ideas in mind, Crake carried out his master plan in two ways: first, by creating the BlyssPluss pill to destroy the present population, and second, by designing beings that could withstand the harmful environment in Atwood’s futuristic setting.
In many ways, Crake possessed a God-complex personality. Although he was set upon denouncing any kind of religious beliefs in his new society, he relished in the fact that he was the one able to create and destroy human
