Vocab Webs

Oryx and Crake - Science

Science plays a very important role in Oryx and Crake. It helps the author create the feeling of a futuristic world. This is done by emphasizing the evolution of science from the stage that it is at today. There are many examples of this, but the best examples are the schooling that follows high school. After kids graduate from high school, they are able to choose what “post-secondary” they want to go to. Crake chooses a place called Watson-Crick. When Jimmy takes a vacation there to visit Crake, we learn about the different classes that are available.

The first is Décor Botanicals, where the kids are developing a wallpaper that can change colours to match the mood you are in. To do this, they are using a highly developed and further modified form of algae. The second class that we hear about is NeoAgriculturals, in which they are modifying chickens so that the growth-rate is high and you can get the most meat out of a single chicken.

The third class they go to is BioDefences, where there are a lot of cages, each with dogs that are all different breeds and sciences. Jimmy says that they look friendly, but Crake then explains that they are not friendly at all. In fact, if you were to  put your hand in the cage, they would bite it off. Crake says that these animals are being developed as a commission for the CorpSeCorps, as a kind of alarm system. These are all perfect examples of science being used to create a futuristic world, because all of these ideas are things that we would never think of today, but to Crake seem like just an everyday regular thing.

This picture represents the idea of the science of the future. It is a picture of a group of cloned babies, each identical in every way possible. Although we are already able to clone people, the idea of cloning people in the novel is a whole new idea, and one that also represents a perfect, idealistic society, where everyone is alike, which is essentially the society that Crake and Oryx tried to create.